When East Meets West

from Milife design

Share-Life straw

From:Design for the other 90%

About half of the world’s poor suffer from waterborne diseases, and more than 6,000 people, mainly children, die each day by consuming unsafe drinking water. LifeStraw, a personal mobile water-purification tool is designed to turn any surface water into drinking water. It has proven to be effective against waterborne diseases such as typhoid, cholera, dysentery, and diarrhea, and removes particles as small as fifteen microns.

More:http://www.vestergaard-frandsen.com/lifestraw.htm

Would a Woodchuck Chuck a Bike Made of Wood?

Wood frame bikes have long given way to aluminum and space age materials but designer Arndt Menke thinks we were too hasty in giving up on one of the strongest, resilient, and lightweight natural materials. There are over 60,000 woody plants worldwide but we use less than 300 of them in a terribly unsustainable way. The Holzweg bike’s frame is totally made of wood and weighs a scant 2.3kg. Could wood frame bikes make a comeback?
This diploma thesis for Menke’s master’s degree demonstrates how careful attention to wood’s natural retention, expansion and anisotropic properties can be advantageous in design. The end result is an incredibly light weight bike, strong and pretty darn good looking too. I really want one.

Human-Centered Interaction Design Lab, Kaist

HCIDL (Human-Centered Interaction Design Lab) focuses on planning and developing human-centered interaction through in-depth research for physical, cognitive, emotional, and socio-cultural aspects of human being.

Research interests include ‘Design Planning' for developing innovative design strategy and concept through user-centered design, contextual inquiry, and future research; ‘User-Interface Design' which focuses on developing and evaluating user-interface design by understanding user's cognitive information process: ‘Emotional Design' for user's emotional satisfaction; ‘Cultural Design' for reflecting user's socio-cultural characteristics on design.

In order for systematic application on research interests, HCIDL develops diverse design tools and software such as video-annotating program for user-observation, remote usability testing program, mouse tracking software, wearable camera for understanding mobile-user's behavior. HCIDL is harnessed with state of art facilities including usability testing room with full equipment of video recording and observation tools, gaze analyzer, and portable ethnographic tool kit for user-observation.

The department of Industrial Design at KAIST started off with the foundation of KIT: Korea Institute of Technology in 1986. With 30 freshmen year students, the faculty was Korea's first design faculty within an engineering school environment. A Master's degree program was established in 1991 followed by a doctorate program in 2002. Since then the department has structured itself with a systematic integration of undergraduate and graduate programs.The department is now preparing to embark as an internationally respected design school, after successfully producing 257 undergraduates and 107 graduates(2003) who are actively contributing the Korea and world design community.

Know more at: http://hcidl.kaist.ac.kr/web/Introduction

Rubik Cube for Blind by Zhiliang Chen

There are six different basic materials involved. They are Metal, wood, textile, rubber, plastic and stone. Different materials give people different senses, which thus enabled the blind men to play. And here we present the very example of this inspiration - The new Rubik Cube.
Designer: Zhiliang Chen

Hi~hi!

Hello ,my name is 李翊禾(Li Yi-he),or you can call me 由希 (yo-shi)
I am pursuing the master degree at industrial design department of NCKU now.

and...welcome to Taiwan!!

Jia Xu's introduction

Hello new friends and old friends. This May will be my first time to be in Taiwan, I am so excited about it. Here is my blurb, hope you can know me more easily through this.

Jia Xia (賈旭) received a Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Design from Tsinghua University, China in 2008. He is now pursuing his Master of Science in the Industrial Design Department at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology [KAIST], Daejeon, Korea He works as a researcher in the Human-Centered Interaction Design Lab in the same Department. He won the 1st prize in Lenovo 'Future Office PC Competition' in 2007 and got in the final 8 of Simons Navigation UI Competition in the same year. He has also participated in many national and international design and research activities. He worked as an intern researcher and designer at Li-Ning Sports Wares Corporation in 2007, at the China Color & Fashion Association in 2006 and at LG Electronics China in 2007.

I have tons of interest and am always happy to know new people. See me at Fackbook via http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=613306469. Also an email to xuujia [at] gmail [dot] com is welcome.

Btw, my team, Ren-ascence rocks! Good luck and see everybody soon!

hey!

Hello! My name is Chun-wei Chang 張君瑋
or you can call me Zoe if you want. :)

I am a junior from NCKU ,Taiwan.
Besides design, I also like traveling ,Shopping,and photography.

This is my first time to joint a design workshop.

It's kind of nervous and exciting.
My excaptation of this workshop is I could learn a lot from my partner and all of the student who are from different nation. And being friend! :)

If you have any qustion (about me or snacks of Tainan... :P)

Welcome to contect me!

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=693100498

msn/e-mail: weiew0502@hotmail.com

Hello world

This is the first post.

We are team Ren-aissance from international deisgn workshop 2009 in NCKU. We will share our progress and thoughts about design, Taiwan, Ren and etc here. Hope you can enjoy: D