Retain, Maintain, and Sustain: An Approach to Cultivate Culture Awareness in Design Students

By:

We are inevitably living in an era of globalization. Enterprises expand globally. Economies have become mutually dependent on one another. Consumer products are aiming at the global market. The whole world is facing global environmental issues. And students are challenged to think globally.

As globalization is moving us to a homogeneous world, industrial designers ought to seriously consider any negative impacts would have been caused by this irreversible trend. Globalization certainly brings human closer together but in the same time it seems to smear cultural boundary resulting with diminishing uniqueness. Today we can find the same restaurants serving the same food on the other side of the world. “IPods” are as popular in Asia as in the United States. Name brand clothing, sport wear, and other apparel are dominating the fashion trend globally. Slowly but surely cultural identity has become blurrier, and this phenomenon is being accepted as the fact of life.

How each culture can maintain its uniqueness for the celebration of diversity is a question we should ponder upon. Awareness of culture should be ingrained in a designer so that design would be expressed in context. When cultural aesthetics is applied to a design, not only users can identify the origin of the product, but also it would help maintaining and sustaining the culture.

This paper is an experimental approach in a furniture design class to cultivate culture awareness in design students by examining cultural aesthetics, and application of the study to furniture design.

Stream: Cultural Sustainability

Paper: , Retain, Maintain, and Sustain

Tin-Man Lau originally from Hong Kong, earned his B.S. in Industrial Design from the National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan in 1983, and his M.A. in Industrial Design from the Ohio State University in 1986. He worked for the Taiwan Kolin Co., Ltd. as an assistant engineer before his graduate study. He jointed the faculty at the Auburn University, Alabama in 1986. He is now a full professor teaching both undergraduate and graduate design courses as well as CAD in the Department of Industrial Design. He is also an independent design consultant specialized in developing consumer products. During his tenure in Auburn, he has directed design projects sponsored by NASA, Brother International, DOE, Frigidaire, Gametime, etc. He has also participated design research projects funded by IBM, SeikoMead, and NASA. He is recently named by DesignIntelligence magazine one of the four Design Educators of the Year 2007 nationally.

Chyun-Chau Lin works as an Assistant Professor in Product Design Department, Shu-Te University, Taiwan. He is also a freelance product designer. He received his Master degree in Industrial Design from Auburn University, USA in 1994, and his PhD degree from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan in 2007. His research activities include visioning approach, innovative product design, design management, design methodology, form aesthetics, and ergonomics.