College Student stationed-in-rural community project, this project encourages young people in Taiwan to come back to their hometowns or rural communities helping the local people with rehabilitating their own typical landscape or handicrafts. Then the culture and traditional lifestyle will be keep for longer, and make young generation accept or learn the features Taiwan used to be.
We decided to submit a proposal to attend this project, and wishing to get the 10,000 New Taiwan Dollars fund for accomplishing our plan. Fortunately, we were picked and began our stationed-in-rural community project in Shan-Jiao.
Stationed-in-rural community project
2013 The class of Master's dregree of NUUID joined Shan-Jiao community to help extending traditional handicraft, setting the brand identification and creating more product lines.
The distance between National United University and Shan-Jiao community is close, and they both in Miaoli county. Because of the location, the communication between them is frequent. People grow a particular plant called “Lin grass” in Yuan-Li district which Shan-Jiao community located. Due to the good touching, comfortable smell and as well absorbent of water, the Lin grass was popularly used to weave mats, hats, bags, est. which were the favorite weaved items of Japanese people. Therefore, Yuan-Li district (including Shan-Jiao) was capable of entire process of Lin grass from growing to weaving to selling. However, the industrial revolution changed everything, which people didn’t rely on handicraft anymore. Young people from Shan-Jiao went out to big city for jobs, and the traditional weaving skill almost fell into disuse…….
Brief Information
In order to gather the heart of local people and local young generation, we held many activities such as weaving workshop, pottery sculpture camp, Lin product design competitions, etc. The local kids enjoyed learning weaving, and the elder craft people enjoyed teaching. We also interviewed their stories, which made them more close to public and so do us. Afterwards, the weaving works became the showpieces in the local museum and the pottery sculptures were put on the new wall of Shan-Jiao elementary school to display the specialty of this community.
Activities
I was in charge of the part of brand creation. For this part, we discussed the creativity in the weaving of Lin grass and local stories about Lin grass with craft people. We also set an appropriate strategy for marketing and selling. Not only make the Lin merchandises more valuable but also express the culture and the knowledge.
The first of all was to find out the characteristics of Shan-Jiao, and define the most important colours-Enterprise Standard Colour. Then we chose the original Lin grass green, dry Lin grass yellow, and brick red, using these colours for the corporate logo design. Every logo design which was related to Shan-Jiao and Lin grass weaving had to match with a name, and we discussed them with local people and professional designers (including NDD design group) and finally chose five representatives for voting which was one of our big activities.
Brand Creation
Before our team stayed Shan-Jiao, there already had a number of merchandises. The problem was even if the products were good; the packages were just low class plastic bags which made consumers belittle the value of the merchandises. Thereby I designed packages for two of them.
The first one was a pair of interior slippers. The motivation was making the style as same as the slippers, and letting consumers reuse the package to react the environmental issues. I chose Kraft boards to be the material of the design, and made the package after purchased can be a shoe rack by easily cutting. There’s a triangular hole on one side, which let consumers feel and see the slippers inside.
The second one was a tamale sachet. To last the same style, I kept using Kraft boards for the package design. As the shape of the tamale sachet was pyramid, I used pyramid-shape Kraft board to cover it, and tie it by Lin grass rope on the top which makes it like a gift. A triangular hole was also set on one surface to last the feeling of series and let consumers touch and see what was inside.
Package design
The motivation in my mind was some accessories cover our skin, because of characteristics of Lin grass is the comfortable smell and good touching. Then there came a mask idea! Masklace is a mask design which has double layers to provide clean protection for face. The inner layer which is foldable is made by washable cotton. When users want to wear it as a mask, they just open and cover it on the face; while the carrying it, users can easily fold the inner layer to prevent the dirt attaching. Two layers can be separated that users can replace it with different inner.
Masklace
(Product design)
The final result presentation was to score every picked team, and chose the best three for prize.
This presentation invited many important rural-development related government officials, local people, and participants’ family; therefore, the organizers asked participants to design the invitation card. My design was showing people in different ages raising their hands and holding together to support and continue the seed which was the symbol of the traditional culture and young generation.The use of calligraphic fonts made the atmosphere stronger and passionate.
I was the host of our presentation. We recorded many prior videos and edited it as live scenes. Therefore I can pretend to talk the people who were on the screen, and dance with them as a “Live talk show”.
As a result, we got the second prize from 30 picked teams which were chosen from entire Taiwan.
The Final
Result Presentation
 |
|---|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|---|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|---|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|---|
 |
 |
|---|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|---|
 |
 |
This is a brief documentary which was edited by me to record all stories during this project.
Hope you enjoy it.
5minutes
Brief Documentary
This is a 13 minutes complete documentary which was edited by me to record all stories during this project. Hope you enjoy it.
13minutes
Complete Documentary
