Strength from struggle

Strength from struggle

Design Academy Eindhoven, 2016 Thesis, Master of Contextual Design Pao Hui Kao

Mentored by Louise Schouwenberg, Koen Kleijn, Jan Konings, Gijs Assmann, Simone Farresin

Dedicated to those who are suffering from the system in Taiwan.

I This book is all about Pao II Abstract III Thesis Research About struggle: from comfort zone to hazard zone Easy life in balance Awareness the invisible box a turning point Get out of box go for difficulty Paper experiment: from control to freedom Before experiment: voice from outside What is Paper?

Paper and glue The struggle of Life, or, materials.

IV

Design process

Material: Stick with tracing paper Glue: Perfect glue for tracing paper Method: Principle of paper shrinks Craft: Patterns, structure Application samples

V Conclusion VI Bibliography

Before you read this, it is better to know

What is this book about?

6

For Pao’s book I suppose to write a thesis about my graduation design. But I cannot find a proper topic for it, moreover, I have no idea about how to write a thesis.

Before came to study Contextual Design in Eindhoven, I have almost three years working experience in industrial design in Taiwan. Basically, my life was quite easy during that period; there is a basic rule: follow the direction from the boss and you will get higher paid, then why not? I do not need to worry about the story for the project any longer, only focus on how to be the perfect hands of my leader. However, after a few years passed by, gradually I found that I lost the capability of independent thinking since that. I lost my creativity, my soul, even worse -myself.

This is why I decided to study in Contextual Design, or it is more about re-defining myself. Now let’s back to the subject, what is the core of this thesis?

Me, a designer looking for the missing story to tell.

Who am I and where is my story?

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Abstract

I use paper as research material. And while experimenting with the material, I feel I am also exploring myself. Through constant dialogues with paper, I hope I can reveal myself during this process of trial and error.

I have a strong interest in craft, paper and material from the nature, which is why I wish to explore various potential of wrinkled paper in this project.

In our everyday life, paper is normally kept away from liquid as if the two are mutually exclusive. But when I once accidently poured water on paper, I was inspired and started to question why we are often annoyed when paper becomes wrinkled after spill of liquid. Why do we try to recover a wrinkled paper to become flat again spontaneously? Ever since paper has been created thousands of years ago, it has more or less remained the same form, a flat sheet. Is it because it is the only option when producing paper or because we never imagine it to be in other form, which restricts its potential and usage?

Water is usually not welcomed in paper’s world. However, I realized that when water is absorbed by paper, it brings power to the stable inner structure, interferes the flattened net of fabrics and rearranges their position. In this context, water becomes an opportunity for the paper to escape from the artificial form of the industrial production but still remain strong enough after it completely dries out. Wrinkles not only unleash paper’s capability of styling but it also turns an ordinary piece of paper into a material with extraordinary and unique aesthetics.

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Research thesis from balance to unbalance, from comfort zone to hazard zone.

Easy life in Taiwan It is very easy to live in Taiwan because you do not need to waste time to explore and research. There always exists one specific answer to one question.

Education in Taiwan is largely forcefeeding students with ready-made teaching materials, all questions having only one correct answer. You do not need to hesitate about the direction of life, like what kind of person you want to be, or maybe you even have no time to worry about these sorts of unimportant issues. You do not need to worry about the next step of every decision, someone always arranges a plan for you. Citizens there do not have to develop personal values and stories, only to follow the order from system. Then you can keep life easy. At one point people will question what is their potential and personality, but it would disappear soon, because going through these annoying puzzles are not helping them to reach a better life. Gradually, people living in the small island forget their own characteristics and lost the motivation to explore; like groups of zombies without target, faith and the inner value of life.

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Awareness of the invisible box a turning point 18th March, 2014, The Sunflower Student Movement, Taipei few months before Pao came to stay in the Netherlands from Taiwan

Midnight, I got a phone call from my sister, who was a bachelor student, when I was going to sleep. She said ‘Pao, we are in the Legislative Yuan. My friends are going to occupy the Legislative Yuan [1]. We are surrounded by a lot of policemen.� I was very scared at that moment. I turned on my television to check every news programs but could not find any report about my sister and her friends. Then I turned to my computer to check PTT [2], surprisingly there was a live program broadcasting the place where my sister was staying. Few minutes later, I saw policemen started to attack those students sitting gently and quietly with aggressively. There was blood and sounds of screaming everywhere. I could not sleep at all that night. In the morning, I turned on the news program on TV again, and finally, there was some report about the protest. However, all the video of the crime of intentional injury the policemen did to the students were all either deleted or had certain parts remove from the original. Most of the Taiwanese who followed major media still have no idea what is going on, they ate breakfast while watching TV, as usual, except the people who got news from alternative media resource; they knew the whole story. That day, I felt the democratic world I was proud of and believed so much in, suddenly collapsed. I realized real freedom never existed in this small island at all, it is just a fake democracy image, manipulated by the government, yes, my government.

18

Get out of the box.

Go for difficulty.

Fear of facing my weakness

I know I am not a perfect person. Lack of confidence is part of my problems, but doesn't matter. I never ever took it seriously because I believed the whole system would guide and support me. I went almost mad when I realized everything in the system to which I belong is not real. I decided that leaving my country and study abroad was the best way for me. At that moment, I was dependent on my parents taking care of me, as I was incapable of living alone. I had a fear of almost everything, such as fire, electronics, not to mention of cooking for myself. The first time I cooked for myself was a big tragedy. Out of my comfort zone everything turned into a big challenge to me.

Dealing with difficulties is painful; however, I found there are over a thousand methods to solve a challenge, not just one model answer, as I was trained to believe. This is the most fascinating part of suffering from a difficult condition. Thinking about how to conquer each new test, I can feel something is gradually released from my inner soul, self-confidence slowly germinating in the shadow of thinking controlled by cramming education [3], bursting the bonds of framework.

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[1] The Sunflower Student Movement is associated with a protest movement driven by a coalition of students and civic groups that came to a head on March 18 and April 10, 2014, in the Legislative Yuan and, later, also the Executive Yuan of the Taiwan. The activists protested the passing of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement by the ruling party Kuomintang (KMT) at the legislature without clause-by-clause review. On July 23, 2015, a related protest occurred, as the Ministry of Education was stormed by AntiBlack Box Movement protesters.

[2] PTT Bulletin Board System is largest in scale and capacity, making it the largest Chinese languagebased bulletin board system (BBS) in the world based in Taiwan.

The BBS has over 20,000 boards covering a multitude of topics, and more than 20000 articles and 500000 comments are posted every day. PTT is registered as a student organization at the National Taiwan University, was founded in 1999 by several BBS sites at NTU. Although PTT is a club and the most famous BBS site in Taiwan, it is not the official BBS site for NTU. The machines and other hardware used to set up PTT was obtained by the administrators without the help of the university, and hence it operates with a high level of freedom. Since 2000, PTT has become the largest online forum in Taiwan due to its increasing number of users. Topics of various issues are enthusiastically discussed on PTT, even to a profound extent generating social impacts in reality. The newspaper and television media started to report on PTT, with journalists assigned to monitor PTT for the latest updates.

[3] In education, cramming is the practice of working intensively to absorb large volumes of informational material in short amounts of time. It is often done by students in preparation for upcoming exams, especially at the last minute. Cramming is often discouraged by educators because the hurried coverage of material tends to result in poor long-term retention of material, a phenomenon often referred to as the spacing effect. When cramming, one attempts to focus only on studies and to forgo unnecessary actions or habits.

22

Paper experiment – from being controlled to real freedom

Before experiment Voice from outside

Instead of sitting in front of my table without any outcome, I picked up a material – paper – as my starting point. To be honest, I have no idea why I chose paper. For me, the only reason I can tell is because it is so accessible, and its easy operation. At the beginning, like most designers, I tried my best to understand this material and approached its limits.

I have to say, doing the experiments and testing really made me excited.

However, more and more pressure arrived soon after. People around me started to ask questions like: “Why did you choose paper?” “It makes me think about this….., it is what you want to express?” “It is so transparent and pure, you want to make a lamp, don’t you?” It was really annoying for a maker, a producer, a creator. Outsiders kept putting their thoughts on the wall, forcing me to agree to their opinions. I can either agree with all of them or reject each one.

Eventually, “paper” is just a title of a material, only one word which could represent many things, depends on people’s perspective.

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“Paper is a thin material produced by pressing together moist fibers of cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets. It is a versatile material with many uses, including writing, printing, packaging, cleaning, and a number of industrial and construction processes.�

- W i k i p e d i a

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When I think about paper, a stereotype jumps to my mind. Google ‘paper’ and the description from Wikipedia also reflects the image. It is a flat material produced by an industrial manufacturing process and a perfect medium for information transmission. Normally its meaning is given from outside, defined by the message written on it, for instance, paper bill, a receipt, or a package. For me, paper is like a nice person who always adapts itself to meet the audience’s expectation. Its basic function as a writing and reading tool easily dominates and becomes a restriction for exploring its other potential.

As a designer, I never consider paper as working material. Mostly I use it as a basic try-out material for mockup. However, I personally consider paper the warmest accessible material, which could perform in many types to accomplish personal improvement. The characteristic of its versatile forms can carry story through different stages in our life.

I still can clearly remember and describe and the elegant lighting of the rice paper lampshade at corner of the stairs in my grandmother’s house. I was not afraid of the dark night at all, since I pass by it on the way to sleep every night when I stay in my grandmother’s house. The yellow warm light gradient from the inner core of the light bulb reflected in the dark environment nearby was as smooth as the light of the full moon. The effect of paper and light gave me an extraordinary memory of my youth. I joined a papercraft group when I studied in elementary school. I learned how to control a paper knife in my hands, gently with patience and cutting sharply with high focus. It was a self-training for a young maker to speak and interact with fragile paper with the hand. This period of playing with paper is a key footstone to nurture my attitude making towards.

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Paper and water

Normally paper is kept away from liquid, where the two are mutually exclusive; however, accidently pouring water on paper inspires me something.

I went back to Taiwan for a few weeks, at the beginning of the year when I was still wondering about the thesis theme. As the flight was approaching Taipei, I was so excited and could not stop thinking about jumping around in my parents' garden, which is located in the outskirts of Taipei surrounded by fields and forests where I spent much of my youth. It was where I started and built my relationship with nature environment. A perpetual source of fascination, my parents’ garden was my playground. There was an old bomb shelter, a catchment basin, huge trees‌ I used to play with my doggy near the papaya tree, sat under the wax apple trees for a picnic with my sister, hid behind a cherry tree when I felt depressed, rows of banana trees, a field, a small lake and thousands of other things. Spilling water on my Moleskine suddenly wakes me up from the old days.

I tried my best to dry the notebook as soon as possible. Later on, the paper crumpled insanely. One might say it is just an ordinary phenomenon, nothing special, .Nevertheless this uncontrollable paper industrial system of production. Water is not merely a big threat to paper, but a stimulus to wake paper from the perfectly flat surface, and back to its native form. Humans harvest cellulose from natural sources, such a trees or grasses, and in a production process they turn this into a precisely flat paper and apply it to many uses. Just like paper suffers from its difficult circumstance, I was trained to fit a system as a passive information recipient and a perfect follower of order; sadly I did not notice that for a long time. These slow, tiny movements from wet paper encouraged me to not fear to question the faith I believe in, against the huge framework around me.

36

Paper, glue, and wrinkle

After I accidently discovered that particular liquids will make paper wrinkle, I first focused on figuring out why paper will shrink, I am curious to find out and what the connection between certain glues and paper, especially how they make paper wrinkle. Some scientific research reveals that paper is a thin material produced by pressing together moist fibers of cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets. It is thin and soft while dry, however, once exposed to water, a flat piece of paper will transform into an extraordinary three-dimensional form. It shrinks during the drying process of paper.

Then, I started to put different glues on the paper, for which I mixed water and ingredients from the kitchen. The first phase of the glue experiment was to figure out how paper reacts to glue. Through plenty of experiments, surprisingly I noticed that the structure of paper would be influenced by different components of glue. It could become stronger or softer. Especially glues made from starch food, such as potato, rice and flour, can make paper strengthen and shrink As I dig deeper, I realised that when water is absorbed by the paper, it brings power to the stable inner structure, interfere the flat-fabric-net, and rearranges their position. At the same time, paper fiber and starch would fuse completely. The glued paper becomes stronger than ordinary thick papers.

Water normally is an unwelcome element in paper’s world. However, in this context, water represents an opportunity for the paper to escape from the artificial form of the industrial production process but still remain strong enough after it completely dries out.

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The struggle of Life, or, materials After the paper experiment, I try to test the limit of the material. The liquid acts like a threat upon the super thin paper, and after a tough struggle, beyond its self-limits, rescued and realized its potential. Just like how I left my comfort zone, left behind all the supports from others, and overcome my fear of lack of confidence. Going through challenges made me rediscover what my advantages, interests and way of thinking are, even though the process was so painful and full of suffering. If I keep staying in my comfort zone because of my fear, and did not dare to challenge myself then I will never make progress. If you never try, you never know what you can do. Paper has the capability to perform in various ways when applying different amount of glue to it. Different from an ordinary flat sheet of new paper, after a long fight with liquid, it learned how to handle the condition which it was fear about and never tried before.

Furthermore, it is able to create elegant textures on the surfaces, which not only make it stronger, more flexible but enrich the appearance of paper.

My next step is to apply the results of the material experiment to design. First I tried to analyse them in terms of - function, shape, structure, and texture...etcetera - the many visible and sensible features combined together to form the world we imagine. The appearance and surface are always the first layers we encounter, and the function we give to the object is the next.

There are two layers to the topic I am going to tackle. One: through embodying the functional and usage of different sorts of paper, reveal the possibility of a singular material. As a designer, if I only had one material-paper, how would I translate this into various functional objects by making use of different characteristics of paper. For this layer, I want to not only explore the possibility of an ordinary material but also express my point of view of form and function.

The other layer is more about control and freedom. The flat paper represents industrial and the highly control system while the wrinkled one stands for self-exploration and freedom. When we speak of functional objects, it often include separate parts. How these out of control paper find their position within the industrial world and bring designer further possibility as a new material.

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Design process

An experiment as a method to rediscover myself.

Material Stick with one specific material- tracing paper

I was looking forward to seeing how different kinds of paper react with glue. After trying home-made-glue with different kinds of paper, only tracing paper shrink regularly and gets harder after it dries. Other kinds of paper, such as wrapping paper and printing paper, almost have no reaction with the liquid. After the attack by glue, they become a sort of mess of crumpled and powerless paper. Obviously, focusing on tracing paper will be the main direction of this project.

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Glue

Find the perfect glue for tracing paper Basically, tracing paper is designed for people who need to cover a first draft and copy or redraw it. So it is made as thin as possible and that is why tracing paper is always super fragile. At the beginning, I tried to stick it layer by layer with wood glue and paper glue; however, both of these normal glues do not workable with the translucent paper. I even applied the most sticky material - resin, a kind of super glue that I know of. Surprisingly, even this did not react with the tracing paper at all. Then I dissected my patient, to figure out the proper glue for tracing paper. After making over fifty types of testing glue and nonstop experiment, I come to the conclusion that only liquid which includes starch, a you find in food stuffs, will make tracing paper really stick hard apart from each other.

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Method

Principle of shrinking of paper The movement of crumpled paper is affected by the amount of liquid: The picture reflects the result of the experiment: the conditions of the wrinkles represent how much liquid the paper has absorbed. The more the glue, which means including a larger amount of water, is absorbed by the tracing paper, the more it will wrinkle. Also, after it dries totally, it will turn a weak paper into a stronger material.

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Craft Wrinkling creates patterns and also turns paper into a structured material

At this stage I focused on different methods of combining paper and glue. I am surprised and amazed to see the resulting patterns. As I improved the skill of each step of precisely combining tracing paper and glue, I could get more pretty and clear texture on it and also see how structural it was: the result with a clear pattern represents a tense and solid construction; one the other hand, the one with an unclear pattern means weak architecture.

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Application

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Conclusion We all know a challenge will make us stronger, and facing difficulty will push us to grow up. The right stimulant, such as a proper material, that appears at the right moment are key points to motivate people to really get a foot in the door. Otherwise, I would still be the same Taiwanese citizen who sitting in front of a computer accepts fake information from the media and follows the project leader’s orders as usual.

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Bibliography Sunflower Student Movement, 2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower_Student_Movement PTT Bulletin Board System, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System Cramming (education) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cramming_(education) Paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper Superabsorbent Polymers, SAP http://highscope.ch.ntu.edu.tw/wordpress/?p=3055 Peter Gentenaar http://www.gentenaar-torley.nl/index.php/peter-gentenaar http://www.museumrijswijk.nl/hpb2004/bio/buess.html