Cultural design of products
Cultural design of products
1. The coming of the era of cultural design
The cultural spirit is everywhere in the products that human beings design for themselves.
The product design of modern meaning emerged in the early 20th century, which is closely related to social development, scientific and technological progress and human's continuous pursuit of material life.Entering the new century, the worldwide product competition is becoming increasingly fierce, design has become an important survival pillar and profit guarantee for enterprises.At present in some developed industrialized countries, from the field of production to the field of life, from high-tech products to labor-intensive products, there is no industry does not use the results and methods of design.The design provides a solid technical platform for improving the competitiveness of products and developing new products.Many foreign experts and scholars predict that the 21st century will be an era of design culture.The creation of new ways of human survival and development will become the tenet and purpose of all design activities including product design, visual design, space design and public design.
In 1951, Konosuke Matsushita declared after his visit to the United States: "The future is the era of industrial design."He then set up the design center at the company.Design has played an important role in making Panasonic the "electronics empire" of today.And he went to the United States together to investigate the famous designer Rongjiu Xiansi founded GK industrial design company.Today, GK has activities all over the world and is one of the most prominent design firms in the world.In 1989, Kiyoshi Miyazaki, a famous Japanese scholar, came to China to give a lecture. He believed that there were three keys to Japan's industrial revitalization and economic take-off: first, the national spirit of hard work; second, the economic policy of continuous improvement; and third, the industrial design of one step ahead.The Japanese are good at integrating their own cultural traditions and social characteristics into their designs.For example, the American Ford automobile luxury, style, once reigned supreme in the world.The Japanese, on the other hand, designed cheap, high quality, fuel-efficient and delicate cars, beating American cars at one stroke and gradually forming a design style of "light, thin, small, clever and beautiful".In the 1960s, Japan developed the "Four Great Instruments" (tape recorder, television, refrigerator, washing machine);In the 1970s, Japan saw the "Three C Revolution" (cars, color TV sets and air conditioners).These new, sophisticated, beautiful products flooded the international market and made the Japanese untold money.A consulting company in Chicago of the United States has studied the success rate of 11,000 new products produced by 77 industrial manufacturing companies, service companies and consumer goods companies, and found that only 56% of the products could maintain market sales for longer than five years, and 46% of the efforts failed.Why such a high failure rate?An important reason is the lack of culture and taste in product design, which can not attract people.
Visible, product design is the key to brand survival.If there is no excellent product design, any advanced technology, sophisticated equipment and strict management can not produce sophisticated products.Now, whether it is the United States, Japan and other economically developed countries, or the Asian "four tigers" and other emerging developing regions, product design as a long-term economic development strategy.Many multinational corporations have put forward the slogan of design and management of the factory, and regard product design as an effective way to accelerate the pace of enterprise development and improve the economic benefits of enterprises.
2. Cultural design of products
The cultural design of products contains four basic elements, namely, cultural function, cultural sentiment, cultural psychology and cultural spirit.
(1) Cultural function.Cultural function is the core element and the first choice subject of product cultural design.The main purpose of product culture design is to endow products with certain cultural functions.The cultural function of a product determines its cultural source and form.Therefore, different cultural functions have different requirements for product cultural design.For example, no matter what product, its operating force, operating speed, operating frequency and so on should meet the mechanical conditions of human movement, all kinds of display parts should meet the requirements of human body to accept information, so that people feel safe, convenient and comfortable operation.In order to achieve such cultural functions, necessary cultural design should be carried out on the product, so that the size of the external objects of the product meets the size requirements of the human body, and the product is coordinated with the physiological characteristics of the human body.A successful product should have practical, aesthetic and cultural functions in one.
(2) Cultural sentiment.As the most perceptual and intuitive element, cultural sentiment is the breakthrough point of cultural design.Consumers buy products, often based on some emotional considerations.Therefore, while the product has the material function, it should also have a certain appreciation value and a certain cultural sentiment.Emotional sentiment is the point, line, surface, body, space, color and other elements constituted by different material materials and technological means, constitute the formal beauty such as contrast, rhythm, rhythm, and so on, as well as the formal beauty reflected by some not specific, but the actual hazy feelings, showing the specific cultural atmosphere of the product.For example, the use of batik or tie-dye fabrics to design fashion, full of strong ethnic cultural sentiment;The use of painted pottery decoration, totem decoration, cave murals graphics to design decoration, rich in a strong original cultural sentiment;The use of antique pottery cup, porcelain bottle, copper jue, wooden box, bamboo tube as wine packaging, it is rich in ancient culture sentiment.One of the main reasons why some young people like jeans, sportswear, casual clothes and products with "foreign flavor" is to pursue that kind of fashionable, exotic and youthful atmosphere.
Cultural sentiment can satisfy people's growing emotional needs.In modern society, the high degree of marketization of economic activities and the rapid development of high-tech tide have caused drastic changes in people's life style.Fast pace, many changes, high competition, high tension to replace the gentle, stable, leisurely travel way of work;All kinds of products continue to pour into the family, so that people more and more to the machine as the object of communication.With the new way of work and life corresponding, people's emotional needs are also increasingly strong.
Just as the famous American futurist Naisbitt said: every time a new technology is introduced into the society, human beings must have a balanced reaction, that is to say, produce a high emotion, otherwise the new technology will be rejected.The more sophisticated the technology, the stronger the emotional response.As a rival to high technology, high emotional need is directly manifested as the perceptual consumption trend of consumers in the field of consumption.What consumers value is no longer the quantity and quality of products, but the closeness of their relationship.They buy goods to satisfy an emotional desire or to pursue a certain good's alignment with an ideal self-concept.Driven by perceptual consumption needs, the goods purchased by consumers are not necessities of life that must be bought, but perceptual goods that can resonate with their psychological needs.Therefore, the so-called perceptual consumption, in essence, is the embodiment of the high emotional needs of human beings in the technological society, is the modern consumers pay more attention to the spiritual pleasure, the realization of personality and emotional satisfaction and other high-level needs outstanding reflection.
(3) Cultural psychology.Cultural psychology refers to the common cultural consciousness formed by a certain crowd under a certain historical condition.For example, in terms of color, children like red and yellow (solid color), children like red, blue, green, gold, young people like red, green, blue, black and compound color, late middle age like purple, tea, blue, green;Men like solid, strong, passionate colors, while women like soft, elegant, lyrical colors.In France, people like red, yellow, blue, pink and other colors, avoid dark green, because it reminds people of Nazi uniforms.In Japan, people generally like quiet elegant colors, tawny, purple and blue are more popular, especially purple, respected by women as a noble and mysterious color.In China, however, urban dwellers prefer simple and elegant colors and bright grey tones, while rural and ethnic minority areas prefer more contrasting tones.Black in the city and white in the country.
The design of the product should give full consideration to people's cultural psychology, so that the shape, color and texture of the product can produce pleasant effects, but can not give people a feeling of old, monotonous and boring, not to mention taboo due to violation of customs.For example, the colors of refrigerators are mostly white and pea green, because white means cleanliness and hygiene, while green symbolizes life. They imply that the food in the refrigerator is edible and beneficial to the body.If the design is black, there will be a sense of the horror of eating from the grave.If the design is blue, it is also terrible, because there is no blue food in the world, only drugs and chemicals can be blue, so the blue refrigerator will give people a feeling of "taking the wrong medicine".
(4) Cultural spirit.Cultural spirit is the most intrinsic, essential and vital feature of a nation or an era, as well as the most expressive feature.Cultural spirit is the general outline of product culture. Cultural sentiment, cultural function and cultural psychology all come down to and depend on cultural spirit.On the one hand, product design should reflect the spirit of national culture.Product design cannot exist in isolation and is bound to be influenced by national tradition and national style.Each nation's unique politics, economy, law, religion and its way of thinking can be expressed through products.What the reason of Germany for instance, Japan is cabinettish, the United States of luxurious, romantic, French, England is reserved with conservative, all without exception reflects in their product design.On the other hand, product design should reflect the cultural spirit of The Times.
For example, green design is a modern design technology that emerged in the 1990s with the idea of sustainable development. It is the future trend of product design. It reflects human's great concern about environmental degradation and resource depletion.Green design follows the three R's, namely Reuse, Recycle, and Reduce.IBM recently announced that its new assembly line will recycle 100 percent of the plastic used to make its central processing units.
Sweden's Regal Motors also launched an environmental policy: all the cars produced by the company, from the design to the recycling of scrap iron, must consider its impact on the environment, to ensure the maximum environmental safety;Eco-friendly and recyclable materials should be considered throughout the product's life cycle, from design, production, use to final disposal.In Germany, the government legislates that television manufacturers must be able to recycle their sets before they can produce them.For this, shi nite electronic company developed a kind of "green TV", its harmful electromagnetic radiation has Germany only domestic standard 1%, machine case converts steel or aluminum material, eliminated the plastic that used before to produce peculiar smell easily when be subject to heat defect, the recovery rate of its parts is as high as 90% above.The focus on green design has also brought in a lot of money for many companies.
In 1993, Kodak reportedly sold 30 million green cameras with an 87% recovery rate by weight.Kodak's best-selling and most profitable camera is a green camera called the Phase-Speed Saver, which recycles its movement and electronics up to 10 times.Recycling auto parts alone is a multibillion-dollar industry in the United States.It can be predicted that without the implementation of green design, products will not be eligible to enter the international market.
