Taiwan Blog Post 1

Arriving in the afternoon sleepy from my morning flight from Shanghai, and stepping off the train in Taipei Main Station my first impression was the palpable "vibe". At first, coming from Shanghai, the Japanese influence was unmistakable to me. Beyond the Japanese restaurants, import stores and gachapons there is a sense in the arrangement of the building that I can only attribute as coming from a Japanese influence. Honestly, I figured Taipei would seem like a bustling metropolis, but instead to me it almost feels cozy, especially visiting the old street DaDaoCheng. The rhythm of the signs, windows and ledges on buildings on the street create a feeling of entering consecutive rooms in a large but lively house. With the near constant rain it only increases the coziness. The two or three story houses with covered walkways past small businesses reminds me of the old Peranakan style houses in Singapore, complete with the “copy-baroque” embellishments.

Moving to the cutting edge of design in Taipei, we visited Dot Design and the Taiwan Design Research Institution. My impression is that Taipei designers largely seemed to follow the mainstream global design languages and aesthetics, but undoubtedly with a local twist. Mostly clearly to me at first was the graphic design style on many posters and books. Owing to the nature of the Chinese language, typography can be more freely arranged. I also found that bold or bright colors were common as accents but in general still managed to follow the trendy flat design aesthetic with minimal depth or texture. This combination I thought is best delivered through Taiwanese book design, which manages to make covers fresh, playful and engaging to look at while largely avoiding the pitfalls of minimalist or copy-paste design that many western book covers end up in. As an industrial designer I thought that the award-winning product design goods, which were mostly tech products that all seemed very sharp and masculine in form and were almost exclusively black in color finish, were interesting but not personally my taste and maybe a little dated by the time I saw them. I do wish I had gotten a better sense of the general design mores of Taiwanese-made household products so I could better visualize a “Taiwan design” aesthetic.

At Dot Design, I really liked the recycled HDPE chairs and gacha toys. I personally quite like the partially transparent speckled effect on all these items but I do wonder if this clearly recycled look is maintained due to aesthetic preferences or is it an unavoidable result of this recycled plastic design. I also have not visited many other recycled material studios so I do not know if this is a global phenomenon or a local Taiwan specialty. Between Dot Design and Trash Kitchen, another sustainable design group, the commonalities in the final appearance were unmistakable.

At the end of only my second full day in Taiwan I feel that my cultural design understanding has only scratched the surface. I’ll probably never truly find the cultural core, but I believe the greatest excitement comes from stepping into the unknown so I can’t wait to keep exploring!