Taiwan needs to stop looking at American and European industrial design for inspiration and develop concepts from its own rich civilization, a German expert said in a speech to young designers and members of the press yesterday.
"How can we export not just `made in Taiwan' but also `designed in Taiwan' and `inspired by the cultural heritage in Taiwan'?" asked Chirstoph Boeninger, director of DesignAfairs -- the independent industrial design wing of Siemens AG.
"You have to go to the [National] Palace Museum to get your inspiration for new products, not to the competition in Europe or the United States," he said.
Boeninger, who judges design awards for the Hannover-based institution Industrie Forum, is in Taiwan to judge the third annual innovative design awards organized by Lite-On Technology Inc (光寶科技).
This year's awards have attracted 900 entries, which will be whittled down to 30 by Thursday, when the winners will be announced, according to Lite-On's chief technology officer, Paul Lo (
"It's very hard to find good designers in Taiwan, and that is why we organize this event to promote local design talent," Lo told the Taipei Times yesterday.
The event is also intended to sniff out potential new employees. Lite-On and other Taiwanese companies are scrambling to find designers to move from their traditional role of producing low-cost custom-made products for large overseas companies -- a role being taken over by China and other developing countries in southeast Asia -- to producing their own branded products, Lo said.
The old industry model needed good engineers, which are abundant in Taiwan. In the academic year just ended, 86,458 students were enrolled on engineering courses out of a total student body of almost 300,000 in the nation's universities, making it the most popular choice by far, according to Ministry of Education statistics. In a telling oversight, there is no breakdown for design students.
The need for more design is becoming more urgent, Boeninger said.
"No industry will survive in the long term without brands, otherwise it will just compete on a price level and if you just compete on the price level, you will lose the game, as there are other people somewhere else in the world that are always less expensive than you are," he said.
The biggest problem in Taiwan is that designers are usually the servants of the research and development department.
Taiwanese designers should be freed from reporting to a particular department, and there should be a seat on the board of directors of every company for a chief design officer, Boeninger said.
Surveys show that 80 percent of Siemens' mobile phone customers buy because they like the design of the phones, which means US$8 billion of the US$10 billion the company made from its mobile phone business last year was directly due to design, he added.
Academic institutions also need to change their methods for teaching design, Boeninger said.
"Get good teachers and carve out a design theory which is really conceptualized in Taiwan, not copied from the US or Europe," he said.
For its part, DesignAfairs will sponsor five design students from Taiwan to work in its studio in Munich for five months this year.
The company hopes to repeat the program in partnership with the China External Trade Development Council.
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to