With globalization, the notion of “creative city” has become a core concept of many cities in the world development policies, with real properties being upgraded or used to change, renewal is being conducted, and creative industries are emerging. This trend has reached its peak in the past decade, with different forms and scales gathering global development momentum among the creative communities to promote the development of creative economies. In recent years, however, there was still skepticism about the sustainability of the current creative communities. Many scholars have pointed out that signs of unsustainability have begun to appear in many creative communities. To overcome these obstacles, the development of rational and highly effective improvement strategy requires a dynamic thinking process. Therefore, this study employs the DEMATEL-based ANP with modified VIKOR (D-DANP-mV) model in presenting an assessment framework for the sustainability of creative communities. This system is used to assess the sustainability of current creative communities and determine how to solve their problems. Thus, continuous and systemic improvement strategies can be developed to achieve the aim of sustainable development. Two creative communities in Taiwan, Taichung Cultural and Creative Industries Park (TCCIP), and Shen-Ji New Village (SJNV), are used as case studies in this study. Based on the concept of systematic improvement from fundamental issues, the results indicate that the improvement priorities can be determined by applying the D-DANP-mV model. This approach is different from those found by a conventional method with the hypothesis of independent criteria (e.g., diversification of creative talents in TCCIP), and cannot use for performance improvement (e.g., only can be used for ranking and selection among alternatives). Considering these points, unreasonable premises, biased errors, and lack of some real application functions in the process of resource allocation could be more efficient improvement strategies generated in this proposed model.

For teaching architectural design, if creativity in students’ practice assignments can be effectively evaluated, it will help make certain the ranking of the performance of different design schemes and provide a critical decision basis for the continuous improvement of each scheme. Based on the review of related literature, this study integrates the grounded theory (GT) from the social sciences’ domain and the method of multiple attribute decision making (MADM) from operations research by analyzing their advantages and congruence to create a qualitative–quantitative evaluation model such as the GT-DANP-mV (GT, DEMATEL-based analytic network process [ANP] with modified VIKOR) model. Then, the characteristics and advantages of this evaluation model were examined by applying it to empirical research. Overall, this evaluation model fully utilized the advantages of the analytical techniques of GT and the MADM method to solve the corresponding problems at different stages of the evaluation study, which realizes their complementary advantages. More crucial is that, whether in the related evaluation study or practice assignments, the application of the GT-DANP-mV model could facilitate the formulation of continuous improvement strategies for architectural design schemes based on performance evaluation results under conditions of limited resources.

A design method of one cultural product based on the meme of artifacts was constructed and applied to the development and design of cultural products. Firstly, the paper puts forward that the outer “tangible” level of the “spatial perspective” of culture corresponds to the dominant meme, as well as the mid “behavioral” level and Inner “intangible” level correspond to the hidden meme according to the theories of meme and the “spatial perspective” of culture. What’s more, the meme was extracted according to the appearance of Liao dynasty ceramics and related research literature. Secondly, based on the extracted meme of Liao dynasty ceramics, the design method of cultural products was constructed by applying the theoretical framework two orders of the signification of Roland Barthes Semiotics to explore the extended cultural meaning of meme and apply its translation to the design of cultural products. The design method of cultural products constructed by this Institute is more inclusive of the intrinsic level of artifacts than that in the past, which only created cultural products that focus on the physical representation of the visual elements. It is an attempt to provide designers of cultural products and students with design background with a design method of cultural products for reference.