Construction of Basic-element Database for Traditional Chinese Culture in Industrial Design

摘要

With the rapid advancement of internet and mobile internet, e-commerce has facilitated international trade and daily shopping. Appealed by the potential large Chinese market, many foreign companies have already got engaged in the development of new products aimed only to Chinese market or in the localization of the old products in Chinese market. In order to achieve this ambition, one of the necessary steps is to localize the external design of the product. However, many designers have never lived in China and thus lacked adequate understanding into Chinese culture. One of the sticky problems that puzzle those foreign designers is how to make full use of traditional Chinese cultural elements. This paper aims to present a Extenics-based method to find out all the possible traditional Chinese elements for appearance designing and establish an information database to provide some reference and help for those foreign designers in need. The applications in several industry designs have approved its effectiveness.