Young Taiwanese designers shined at this year’s German iF Concept Design Award competition, with 24 entries making it into the top 100, and four reaching the top 10.
The competition received more than 12,000 submissions from 58 countries this year and only 340 submissions made it past the judging panels to reach the final round for the selection of the top 100. From this final 100, the 10 best were selected for cash prizes.
Among Taiwanese entries, Ou Pei-ling (歐佩玲) of Greater Kaohsiung’s Shu-Te University received the highest rank of third place for a poster titled Freedom of Speech.
Photo: Su Fu-nan, Taipei Times
“We always see famous people, celebrities, the wealthy and those holding power speaking and being reported on the news. However, less privileged groups have no access to the media. Their voices and opinions are subjugated or taken away. So I chose freedom of speech as the central theme of my design,” said Ou, a student in the university’s Department of Visual Communication Design.
She said it took her a week to create the poster, adding that her professor, Chang Chien-feng (張建豐), gave her useful advice.
“He reminded me to think on a deeper level. So I turned the microphone upside-down to express the idea of protesting voices. Restrictions on freedom of speech are represented by the image of the caged bird,” she said.
Photo courtesy of Yang Pei-chi
Three other entries from Taiwanese students also made the top 10.
Among them was a product idea called “Easy plug,” designed by graduate student Huang Jui-min (黃瑞閔) and undergraduate Wu Pin-chieh (吳品潔) of Yunlin University of Science and Technology’s Department of Creative Design.
Using magnets in the center of a plug and a configuration of concentric electrodes, they designed an easy-to-use plug for inconveniently-placed sockets.
Guided by magnetic forces, users can use the product to locate even the most difficult to find sockets.
Another top 10 design was the “Easy Check” syringe designed by Wang Wei-shen (王偉燊) and Chen Hung-yu (陳泓佑), graduate students at the Department of Industrial Design at National Cheng Kung University in Greater Tainan.
Wang said his aunt has diabetes and requires an insulin injection after meals. However, due to her poor eyesight, she has to use her glasses to be able to clearly see the numeric volume markings on the syringe.
In response, the two students designed a magnifying glass on an orb that can be attached to the syringe. Through light refraction on the convex lens, the markings are magnified for easier viewing, making the syringe easier to use.
Another top 10 design came from Yang Pei-chi (楊珮祺), who submitted a series of posters on the theme of “Size Zero Models.”
Yang said she wanted to overturn the pervasive attitude of “thin is beautiful” for women, especially in the fashion industry.
Her renditions of three classic paintings — Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Paul Gauguin’s Three Tahitians and Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus — portrayed the female subjects as emaciated figures with jutting ribs as a parody of size-zero models.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching