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.
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