PORTFOLIO AI WENBO
CONTENTS 1. INTERACTIVE DESIGN 1.1 The British Museum ...................................... 3 1.2 Wuhan Metro Map Design ............................ 7 1.3 Anti-Smoking Game Design .........................13 1.4 Interactive Calendar .....................................17 2. HANDCRAFT DESIGN 2.1 Geometric Paper Lantern ...........................19 2.2 World Tree .................................................. 22 2.3 3D Poster ................................................... 23 2.4 Love Lette .................................................. 23 3. BOOK DESIGN 3.1 Fortress Besieged ....................................... 25 3.2 My Design Journey ..................................... 28 4. CULTURE HERITAGE DESIGN 4.1 Dongba script ............................................. 32 4.2 Chinese New Year painting ........................ 36 REFLECTIONS ON MY DESIGN JOURNEY .............39
1 INTERACTIVE DESIGN 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4
The British Museum Wuhan Metro Map Design Anti-Smoking Game Design Interactive Calendar
1.Interactive Design
BRITISH MUSEUM
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1.1 THE BRITISH MUSEUM
The aim of this project is to promote good service while providing an exciting experience of the British Museum. After creating a customer journey map, generating a storyboard and conducting interviews, I found that most visitors do not have clear visiting routes: they frequently lose their ways and are quickly tired by the aimlessness of their journeys around countless de-cultured cultural objects.
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It is impossible to visit the entire museum in a few hours and completing a meaningful tour is a challenge for tourist groups. How can a clear guide be provided while, simultaneously, encouraging enthusiasm and avoiding over-saturation? These are problems which this project seeks to address. Based on the reality of user experience, when visitors use the map on their journey through the Museum they are led and introduced to the top ten treasures. However, it remains complex and time-consuming to find the object or collection in the room they have chosen on the map. The primary aim in visiting the British Museum is to experience world cultural treasures. The innovative concept here was to construct such an experience as if it were a treasure-hunt. When visitors read the map at the museum the experience is like holding an ancient treasure map: follow the clues and discover the treasures. The aim is to change the usual insipid and off-putting guides into an interactive game that is fun, instructive and memorable – and never boring.
before -> now
MODERN WAY
ANCIENT WAY
exploration by treasure map
visiting musem by map can we go back?
1.Interactive Design
After the prototyping and blueprint, the output was designing an activity with specific visitors in mind. For example, an international tourist group with little time, or children who love to play games. The activity has three stages: firstly, the visitor pays a pound for the map and to join the game; secondly, they locate the top ten treasures one by one and their treasure seal is stamped.
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TREASURE BOX Finally, and optionally, they get a discount when they buy a souvenir after getting their seal stamped. They can then put the souvenir – for example, a model of an artefact, a post card depicting an object or a special invitational treasure card – with the map into a box and send this to a friend. This then acts as a promotional invitation for a further series of visitors to the Museum who will be motivated by what they have received.
1.Interactive Design
1.2 Wuhan Metro map design
Everyone forms a unique abstract impression for each city they visit and part of this formation will depend on the design of the metro map. Taking this into account my metro map provides a comprehensive and easy-to-use guide for travel across the city. It also constitutes a key impression in a traveller’s mind, generating a vital first urban impression for tourists in an unfamiliar city. It acts as the key to the city and each line is made memorable because it contains a different emotional experience.
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City identification system / emotional impression map
1.Interactive Design
The Wuhan metro map is used to connect local landmarks using visual symbols. The association process composes a unique emotional topography, drawing the outlines of abstract emotional impressions. These are then joined together meaningfully in the minds of users.
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DESIGN Icons FOR EACH STATION
Each station name is changed from text to a visual representation: readers should immediately recognise their environment and the type of district from the visual image.
1.Interactive Design
Using illustrations changes the impersonal underground environment.
Wuhan’s Number Two line represented as a journey up the station steps. As travellers climb they can enjoy their journey and learn more about each stop.
At stations where different lines cross there would be these visually attractive and colour coded information posts.
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Souvenir designs for Wuhan Metro
These designs - of travel cards showing the different lines and destinations, a poster and a children’s game - add both memorable texture and information in ways that are easy and enjoyable to use.
1.Interactive Design
1.3 Anti-Smoking Game Design
ANTI-SMOKING GAME DESIGN
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Office workers tend to smoke during their breaks. The aim here was to design a game which they can play instead of smoking.
1.Interactive Design
The game is based on narrative: to develop a new anti-smoking medicine, Dr Leo is conducting research in his laboratory. There he is engaged on destroying the “Nico� virus. Four different young people assist the doctor in fighting the virus.
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Players can select their roles in the game, which has two modalities: online and offline, the latter easily played communally in the office recreation room or canteen. The aim is to illustrate the harmfulness of smoking while promoting the office community in a relaxed and healthy way, giving the chance of a modicum of exercise.
1.Interactive Design
1.4 Finding time – an interactive calendar
The traditional paper calendar is vanishing. It is being replaced by electronic calendars available on almost any system from digital watches and mobile phones to tablet and desktop computers. How can the calendar be redesigned to fit this changing environment and add new functions to make it both more interesting and more useful? Here is an interactive calendar: it combines the traditional calendar with a puzzle. Each day the user must move one block to display the date. Through this action this calendar reminds people that time is precious, evaporates swiftly and should be cherished.
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2 HANDCRAFT DESIGN 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4
Geometric Paper Lantern World Tree 3D Poster Love Letter
2.Handcraft Design
2.1 Geometric Paper Lantern
Geometric reinvention of monogatari poetry in the form of an ecologically sustainable paper lantern.
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This series is composed of geometric lights made of rice paper. The inspiration comes both from epic literature and from traditional Chinese bronze manufacture which uses a model, casting molten copper on its surface, then removing the model after the copper has cooled. In this reinvention, waste paper is soaked in water then wrapped on the mould. The mould is then removed once the paper has dried and coloured lights are introduced before the whole is sealed and painted with oils.
2.Handcraft Design
This project uses traditional crafts in the design of something modern and environmentally sustainable.
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2.2 “World Tree” – anti-terrorism installation art
Wire was used to follow the contours of a global map and papier-mâché to wrap the wires. Two injured peace doves, searching for freedom, have died in this trap.
2.Handcraft Design
2.3 3D POSTER This is a 3-D poster, using shaped paper to show how industrial discharge affects people’s health. This poster needs to be hung in front of a light source such as a window or light box. The light passes through the gaps and illuminates the installation. This is an exploration of the concept of the poster using light to create a visual performance.
2.4 LOVE LETTER The paper carries a special emotion much like a love letter was once integral to courtship. Love letters have vanished from modern, electronically mediated societies but this relies on a folk memory. When the old letter it turned over, a complex emotion pours out. This faded memory is irreplaceable compared with more modern communications. Faded rolls of paper are used to express the delicate yet complicated and deeply romantic memory.
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3 BOOK DESIGN 3.1 Fortress Besieged 3.2 My Design Journey
2.Handcraft Design
3.1 Fortress Besieged
Exploring visual language and literary rhetorical devices
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Fortress Besieged (围城/ wéi chéng) is a novel written by Qian Zhongshu and published in 1947. This is a modern Chinese masterpiece as well as a significant part of world literature. In it Qian uses various tropes including picaresque humour, tragic-comedy and satire in the context of Eastern philosophy and the morality of bourgeois Chinese society. The title is from a French adage quoted by Montaigne: “Le mariage est comme une forteresse assiégée; ceux qui sont dehors veulent y entrer, et ceux qui sont dedans veulent en sortir. Marriage is like a fortress besieged; those outside want entry, those inside want to leave.” By extension, everyone is imprisoned by their perceptions. Reflecting on this, I use corrugated paper as the book jacket to reflect this idea of imprisonment. Since the novel uses tropes based on a fusion of design and literature, I explore how visual language expresses literary technique. The concepts of fragility and imprisonment were what I intended to express in this design.
2.Handcraft Design
The hero of Fortress Beseiged writes a letter to his lover and in this reflects on the weakness of his character. To illustrate this – or perhaps to mimic it – I have sewn the love letter between two blank pages. Its fragility is unusual in the context of the usual robustness of a book. Readers may sense the hero’s feeling of weakness, having to be very careful as they expose the letter.
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3.2 My Design Journey
This book records an important turning-point on my design road. I painted this moment on canvas using illustrative techniques to bring alive the moments of memory. Inspiration comes from my daily sketchbook from which I chose key moments that represent my design journey. I used paint to express best feelings at each stage of illustration.
2.Handcraft Design
My design journey: exploring with and through a visual diary
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2.Handcraft Design
4 CULTURE HERITAGE DESIGN 4.1 Dongba script 4.2 Chinese New Year painting
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4.1 Dongba script
Dongba script is the ideographic and logo-phonetic pictographic system – similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs – still used by the people in eastern Tibet and by the Naxi minority in Yunnan province. It has its origins in the primitive intersection of oral and drawn language but is now gradually vanishing because of the standardising power of Mandarin Chinese.
2.Handcraft Design
Visual graphics have the potential to cross language barriers and become a modern way of presenting information. These pictograms, just like other primitive communication symbols, constitute communication through images.
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This series of art works, emblematic in design, are inspired by Dongba pictograms. They combine ancient symbols and simultaneously promote the threatened minority Dongba culture. These graphics make people think about cultural diversity and perhaps warn against the extinction of a unique heritage.
2.Handcraft Design
4.2 Chinese New Year painting
WOOD ENGRAVING: NEW YEAR PAINTING
New Year painting is a traditional Chinese cultural activity, a kind of folk craft, with its origins in the Tang dynasty. Now people have become accustomed to the mass production of commercially printed pictures, while wood engraving of New Year art is gradually being forgotten. Aesthetic opinion can, however, be changed and traditional activities can be reclaimed and handed down.
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The purpose of this project is to revive a lost cultural practice. To that end, I went to the ancient city of Kaifeng and there visited studios where only a few artists still work and hope to pass on their skills. There I studied and, drawing on the experience of this example, created a New Year’s poster based on the hand-painted wood engraving culture yet infused with a modern aesthetic.
2.Handcraft Design
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2.Handcraft Design
Through these two projects - Dongba script and wood engraving - I want to make a contribution to traditional Chinese culture, especially handcraft. China is developing fast after a century of chaos and catastrophe. Having considered civilizations where traditional methods have either been abandoned or forgotten in the blind rush of aggressive capitalism, it is clear few people want to engage with a cultural heritage that can no longer provide them with a living. Awareness of – let alone respect for – the significance of cultural heritage is often at a premium in such situations.
Reflections on my design journey These projects, finished during my undergraduate course, taught an important aesthetic lesson: it is never enough to inherit culture passively through consuming visual arts. Promoting these vanishing traditions means active and thoughtful participation. One reason I want to continue my studies is to learn more about the processes of culture active in co-design, innovation design and strategy. These are strongly represented by the work done at the Aalto research unit. My aim is to use new skills and knowledge to stem cultural degradation, specifically in China.
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