In recent years, the economic trends of Asian countries have shifted from high-tech to multicultural industries, such as in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore and Taiwan, which have built cultural and creative industries an important economic strategy. In order to cope with this trend, the Taiwanese government is actively developing the cultural and creative industries to enhance the competitiveness of Taiwanese economy by merging creativity into the culture and industry, and introducing integrated marketing strategies.
Many of the methods of cultural and creative design in the world now are based on the transformation of simple shapes and the metaphysical spirit of the metaphysics. Due to the lack of expert analysis and systematic innovative thinking, to establish a complete and more flexible design patterns with innovative ideas would be rather difficult. Therefore, in order to formulate a complete design model of cultural and creative products, we first categorized 175 Taiwanese cultural products into 12 types of design methods by KJ Method (Affinity Diagram). Further, summarized into three groups such as “The Application of Shape Transformation”, “The Reappearance of Situational and Sensory Experience” and “The Application of Technology”. Furthermore, the design model has integrated with the Buddhism concepts of “Substance, Appearance, and Function”. This research classifies cultural elements and 12 types of design methods into three attributes: “Substance (Essential Spirit)”, “Appearance (Shape and Appearance)”, and “Function (Methods and Techniques)”. Hence, this research is consist of “A Cultural and Creative Product Design Process Constructed by the Concepts of ‘Substance, Appearance, and Function’”.
In order to verify the feasibility of applying the concepts of “Substance, Appearance, and Function” to cultural and creative design, this research selects the Bangka LungShan Temple in Taiwan as the object of study. This research first explores the symbol of the cultural elements through the field research and literature surveys. Then, this research uses the concept of “Substance, Appearance, and Function” to transform cultural elements and apply cultural and creative design methods to complete two demonstration designs: Sea-of-Cloud Bench and Raving about Landscape. Finally, both works were participated in the design competitions and exhibitions. This research interacts with the user on scene to investigate the feedback from the product design point of view. Most of the users believe that Sea-of-Cloud Bench and Raving about Landscape are rich in traditional cultural images and the unique value of element transformation, containing the spirit of traditional crafts and aesthetics. In this paper, this research hopes to provide a new emphasis on mental thinking of the design model, and to build a various cultural and creative design methods as well as a new cultural and creative thinking for future designers.