Students from Shu-Te University’s visual communication design department took home six iF Design Awards, including one for Trash Talk (講幹話), a booklet on what designers say has become a “subculture” in Taiwan.
Trash Talk, which won an award in the Communication category, was designed by students Cai Wei-qun (蔡偉群), Lin Cai-ling (林采玲), Xu Chen-wei (許宸瑋) and Chen Yi-an (陳怡安).
Trash talk is commonly used in “various social settings and relationships, whether religious or political, at work or at home,” a description of the work on iF Design Award’s Web site said.
Photo copied by Su Fu-nan, Taipei Times
Calling trash talk “indirect and ironic,” and potentially selfish or deceptive, the four students said that the purpose of the booklet was to “emphasize how communication in modern Taiwan is often full of contradictions.”
Ridiculous Rules (謬視規矩), Girl Crush (女漢字), Tofu (白字田) and The Adventure Travelogue of Taiwan 300 Years Ago (踏岸) also received awards for communication, while Artillerools (砲製金刀) was selected for an award in the Packaging category.
Girl Crush, designed by students Chio Sok-leng (趙淑瑩), Tsai Hsiang-yu (蔡湘玉), You Yi-ting (尤臆婷) and Gao Jia-lin (高嘉璘), is a “dictionary of words related to women.”
Through modern illustrations and soft lines, the designers describe the values and symbolism associated with women in Chinese characters.
For example, the character that means “to marry” for a woman (jia, 嫁) is made up of the characters for “female” (nu, 女) and “home” (jia, 家), the designers said.
Therefore, for a woman to marry means to give her a home, they said.
The dictionary includes 160 Chinese characters categorized into four groups according to the “four virtues” in the Three Obediences and Four Virtues (三從四德) — a set of ancient guidelines for the behavior of women — along with annotations and references.
Commissioned by the Kinmen County Cultural Affairs Bureau, Artillerools is a souvenir designed by Huang Shi-ming (黃士銘), Wang Yu-chao (王昱超), Lin Wen-yu (林玟妤) and Xia Shih-han (夏詩涵).
The product, which includes a pair of small scissors, was inspired by the way people craft knives and other objects out of the millions of artillery shell casings that were left behind from the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, the designers said.
The packaging was designed to look like an artillery shell, while incorporating elements of the county’s “wind lion gods” (fengshiye, 風獅爺) — lion-like statues traditionally believed to protect Kinmen from sandstorms and strong winds — as well as Western architecture.
The product “transforms the battlefield into a place of peace,” a description on iF Design Award’s Web site said.
In The Adventure Travelogue of Taiwan 300 Years Ago, designers Chang Ching-wen, Yu Yuan-pin (游原彬) and Chen Yu-xuan (陳育玄) use a series of illustrations to recreate western Taiwan during Qing Dynasty emperor Kangxi’s (康熙) reign.
They based their illustrations on stories from the Small Sea Travel Diaries (裨海紀遊) — a travelogue written by Chinese traveler Yu Yonghe (郁永河) in 1697 believed to be the first travelogue ever written about Taiwan.
Tofu is a collection of poetry inspired by tofu, which designers Chen Li-syuan (陳俐璇), Liu Pin-yi (劉品宜) and Yen Chun-fan (顏均帆) call an “integral part of Asian culture.”
“Underneath its surface, tofu radiates with purity, simplicity and elegance,” they said in a description on the iF Design Award’s Web site.
With Ridiculous Rules, designers Hung Yah-wen (洪雅文), Su Xiu-wen (蘇琇雯), Chuang Wan-ting (莊琬婷) and Chen Yu-feng (陳玉楓) help readers understand the “often simply ridiculous” origins of the rules people live by.
Shu-Te University this year received the most iF Design Awards of any university in the nation, it said in a statement on Friday last week.
To date, more than 200 of its students have taken home a total of 16 iF Design Awards, including an iF Gold Award and 64 Red Dot Design Awards, as well as 14 Best of the Best awards, it said.
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