A design team named 2 Cities St has created a virtual character that is a personification of Taiwan by collecting and combining the faces of 10,000 Taiwanese.
Hopefully, the character — named Dai Yi-wan (戴怡宛), a wordplay on “Taiwan” — will boost the nation’s global profile, said the team, which has four members: Liu Yu-ling (劉昱伶), Shen Sheng-hsun (沈昇勳), Huang Wei-kai (黃威愷) and Chen Yu-lu (陳育律).
They used using artificial intelligence (AI) to create the design, which they hope will qualify for next year’s Young Lions Design Competition, an international festival of creativity in Cannes, France from June 22 to 26.
Photo: Lu Yi-hsuan, Taipei Times
The character, which is rendered as a woman, was built by an AI program that combined headshots of 10,000 Taiwanese, with well-known political figures — including President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate — making up an outsized proportion of the samples, as pictures of politicians are easier to find on the Internet, the team said.
According to Dai’s “resume,” after graduating from National Taiwan University in 2006 with a double bachelor’s degree in political science and public health, and a sociology minor, it worked as a legislative assistant and contributed to government projects.
It participated in projects, with effective results, such as a promotion for AIDS screening, climate change training and establishing an open platform for government data, the resume says.
Cross-strait relations have left Taiwan unrecognized on the global stage and facing hurdles to interact with other nations, Liu said.
“If it is difficult to use the nation’s identity to promote Taiwan, then we can use a person to introduce our country,” she said.
The situation Taiwan faces can be compared to a marginalized student, with the global community knowing little of its achievements in sustainable development, Shen said.
However, if Taiwan could be treated from a person-to-person perspective, perhaps more rationality would emerge and people would realize that Taiwan is “a friend worth having and an employee worth hiring,” he said.
Dai has Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and is building a social network, Shen and Huang said.
The team’s biggest goal is for Dai to receive job offers from international organizations, as it would be the perfect way to prove to the world that “Dai Yi-wan — Taiwan — can help,” they said.
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