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 offer great potential for enhancing design value and becoming recognized in the global market. Evidence shows very high prospects for Taiwan’s local cultures to become crucial cultural elements in future design applications. The purpose of this paper is to explore the meaning of cultural objects from Taiwan’s aboriginal cultures and to extract their cultural features. The paper attempts to illustrate how, by enhancing the original meaning and images of these cultural features and by taking advantage of new production technologies, they can be transformed into modern products that meet the needs of the contemporary consumer market. The particular cultural object chosen for this study was the Linnak, literally meaning “twin-cup” in the Paiwan language. The study focuses on analyzing the appearance of the Linnak, how it is used, its cultural meaning, its operational interface, and the scenarios in which it is used. Finally, this paper establishes a cultural product design model that is meant to provide designers with a valuable reference for designing a successful cross-cultural product. The results presented herein provide an interface for examining the way designers communicate across cultures as well as the interwoven experience of design and culture in the design process.