Transforming Taiwan Aboriginal Cultural Features into Modern Product Design: A Case Study of a Cross-cultural Product Design Model

With their beautiful and primitive visual arts and crafts, Taiwan’s aboriginal cultures should have great potential for enhancing design value, and being recognized in the global market. Evidence shows that the prospect of Taiwan’s local cultures will undoubtedly become crucial cultural elements in future design applications. The purpose of this paper is to explore the meaning of cultural objects and to extract their cultural features from Taiwan’s aboriginal culture. This paper attempts to illustrate how, by enhancing the original meaning and images of Taiwan aboriginal culture features, and taking advantage of new production technology, they may be transformed into modern products and so fulfill the needs of the contemporary consumer market. The Linnak, literally “twin-cup ” in the Paiwan language, was chosen as the cultural object for this paper and its appearance, usability, and cultural meaning were studied. Then, this study focuses on the analysis of cultural meaning, operational interface, and the scenario in which this object is used. Finally, this paper establishes a cultural product design model to provide designers with a valuable reference for designing a successful cross-cultural product. Results presented herein create an interface for examining the way designers communicate across cultures as well as the interwoven experience of design and culture in the design process.