Blog #2

Welcome back to my second blog post! For the latter half of this first week that I spent in Taipei Taiwan, I was able to learn and explore more of the tradition, nature, and modern design. From Wednesday until today (Saturday), I and my cohort visited several exhibits/museums including: LTSER Feitsui/the Pinglin area, the National Palace Museum, Yingge Ceramics Museum, and Taihwa Pottery Painting, alongside working on a group design project at the NTU.

Within these field trips, walking along the river and hills of the Pinglin area was one of the more standout experiences.

I would describe this experience as a "sustainability walk". Our tour guide spent the morning walking with us beside the river, pointing out those in the field (and quite literally in the river), the water was being tested, and the research was used for conservation efforts. Sustainability can be about creating something new but can also about understanding and working with what is already there. Seeing the landscape and learning about the relationship between the environment and the communities around it made me think about how design can respond to a place instead of changing it.

This idea continued when we visited Pinglin and the tea museum. Tea is such an important part of Taiwanese culture, but it is also connected to the landscape, agriculture, and local communities. Pinglin in itself was super cool because back home in Seattle, the church that I attend has a branch that extends to Pinglin every year, spending 1-2 weeks together in Taiwan in late July. It was very cool to experience what the town was like firsthand and hear about it from a lot of friends back home. It was a connection in it of itself.

The next museum that we visited was the National Palace Museum. It was beautiful, having preserved the physical appearance through the architecture and urban layout of the building, but making it a museum that was accessible to everyone. It blends tradition and modern advancement.

Above is a photo of the palace garden that is an exhibit you can visit as part of the experience. The garden created a space where you could slow down and experience the history of the place in a different way. It made me think about how preservation isn't necessarily keeping something frozen in time, but also it can mean finding ways for people today to interact with it. 

Of course, this is a program that we spend time working on our design projects. For the evening on Thursday, my group was at NTU collaborating. This allowed us to capture a beautiful sunset with the skyline of Taipei.

Working on a project alongside NTU students was not only a whole new experience, it was also so beneficial to our learning and contributed to ideas for our project. Since the project focused on Taiwanese culture and user experience, we can't look through that lens entirely. So, any questions we had about Taiwanese culture could be brought forward and discussed in our group. It was how we came up with the idea that we wanted our project to move in the direction of "cross-culture" and intertwine Taiwanese culture with other cultures.

To tie it all back together in relation to tradition and modern design, I want to talk about my favorite day of this program so far. The Yingge Ceramics Museum and the Taihwa pottery painting. One of the things I found most interesting was seeing ceramics being used in modern applications, within the museum there was older artifacts and in contrast also modern art pieces and new application of ceramics. This included medical and dental objects:

Which is cool for me because I have one (a ceramic tooth coating on one tooth)! Most people associate ceramics with pottery, dishes, or decorative objects. But the material can be adapted for completely different purposes, this shows even more how traditional materials can continue to evolve with technology. The material itself has a history, but its use isn't stagnant in the past. This carries into the Taihwa pottery painting experience. There's something different about learning about a craft versus actually sitting down and making something yourself. It made me think about how important hands-on experiences can be when trying to preserve traditional crafts. If people are able to participate in a tradition rather than only observe it, it becomes something that can continue to be passed down.

The biggest thing I have taken away from this week is that sustainability and tradition don't have to mean resisting change. They can actually be part of innovation. Whether it was the natural environment around Feitsui, the history of tea in Pinglin, the Palace Museum, or the modern applications of ceramics in Yingge, I kept seeing examples of old ideas being given new meaning. It has made me think more about how I want to approach design: instead of always asking what can be created next, I want to also ask what already exists, what can be preserved, and how it can be reimagined for the future.