Design in Taiwan - Blog #2 - Farewells and Sweet Potato Birds

    Hello blog! At the time that this post was written and posted, it would have been the seventh day of our study abroad, Saturday, 09/07/2024. I will be updating you all on what had happened in the past four days-spoiler alert, a lot has happened! 

    First things first, we wrapped up our cultural hackathon with Shih Chien University design students where we were tasked with taking an object (or material) that is culturally tied to Taiwanese culture and creating something new with it. We designed an up-cycled light fixture that mirrors Taiwanese love temple motifs to simulate the ambiance one would experience at those love temples. I was in a group with three other University of Washington students (pictured below), Astrid Huang (far left) and Winghi Li (far right), and two Shih Chien University students, Vivi Chen (second to far left) and Shanny (squat in the middle), then me squatting, second to the far right. This was a short but fun project only lasting two days, and I'm pretty proud of what we were able to accomplish. 

(Another picture of us :D)

    Also, it's really difficult to see, but we were gifted stamps with our Chinese names on them after the cultural hackathon (pictured below)--such a sweet gift!

    The night before the last day of the cultural hackathon, some of my classmates and I did our laundry, and we came across this part of a barricade that said, "NO KISS". This, I thought, was extremely funny, not only to look at but to think about because you can kind of guess the story behind this spectacle pretty easily. However, if you weren't able to, one could guess that this spot hosted a lot of make-out sessions for couples, and one unfortunate tenant who would've had to witness such passionate displays of love, had enough and wrote this on the barricade to scare off the perpetrators. Picture below is my roommate almost about to kiss the barricade (oh, the irony). 

    Oh! I forgot to mention but before the end of the cultural hackathon, our class and a couple of other Shih Chien University students went on a tour to the Dot Design studio, a well-known design studio dedicated to sustainable design, specifically packaging. We learned a lot about the different processes that occurs when creating sustainable packaging from conception to shipment, and we were exposed to various sustainable materials native to Taiwan, such as those derived from pineapple leaves and corn kernels. Before this, I didn't realize how achievable sustainable designs can be, in terms of manufacturing. This visit definitely opened my eyes to the power of design and technology. 

    After the cultural hackathon, we had a farewell dinner with SCU student and faculty and left for Tainan for National Cheng Kung University the next day after. Pictured below is our wonderful program director and industrial design professor at UW, Meichun Liu next to the Department of Industrial Design building at NCKU, her alma mater. 

    Kind of off-topic, but this is a stack of stools that I saw on our way to our hotel in Tainan that I thought was beautifully designed-look how they cascade and nest! 

    After introducing ourselves, students from NCKU gave us a tour around campus. My first observation were these really adorable birds that I unfortunately didn't grab the name of, but they were interesting because they moved like chickens but had a similar anatomy to kiwis and storks. I called them "bowling pin birds", but upon further discussion with NCKU students, I found out that they called them "sweet potato birds", since they're similarly colored and shaped like sweet potatoes. It's interesting to see different perspectives on topics like the naming of birds since it makes you think, "huh, there's no one way to look at things". Pictured next is a stair rail that is composed of metal bars, shaped around the staircase where one rail is split off to serve as the rail handle which I thought was an elegant design solution to balance aesthetic with usability. 

    That's it for this blog! Thanks for reading, I'll report back to y'all soon!