Empirical Study on Design Trend of Taiwan (1960s–2020): The Evolution of Theme, Diversity and Sustainability

Abstract

With significance in improving and developing local design culture as well as in supplementing global design history, this essay describes a study on the past and a clear prediction of the future by exploring Taiwan’s design history from approximately the 1960s to 2020 based on the evolution of theme, diversity, and sustainability. In this research, the Python programming language is used to apply three algorithms of term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), Simpson’s diversity index (SDI), and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to conduct a text exploration of design journals. The results show the following: in the 1960s–1980s, the evolution of theme focused on evaluation strategies, technical practices, and foreign cultures, on digital design, multiculturalism, and design aesthetics in the 1990s, and on emotional human factors, intelligent technology, and local culture since the beginning of the 21st century. Local culture and intelligent technology are the main driving forces of the current design industry. Regarding diversity, after a period of rapid change and stable rising, it has shown a downward trend in recent years. This indicates that current design needs to be stimulated by external environmental variations. Sustainability was focused on technology, the market, and education during the 1960s–1980s; on consumers, design education, and eco-design during the 1990s; and on integration across fields during the 2000s–2020. In order to gain a wider perspective of the complete design context of Chinese culture, the results show the current and future trends of the academic community, in addition to a reference for the study of the design histories of other areas in the world.

How Could Consumers’ Online Review Help Improve Product Design Strategy?

“…By weighting and blending the weights of different topics, a comprehensive measure of topic preference is obtained to represent the degree of preference for different topics among Trump's followers on Twitter. Huang et al [36] applied three algorithms, namely term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), Simpson's diversity index (SDI), and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), to explore the design trends in Taiwanese design journals since the 1960s, of which the results reveal the current and future trends in the academic community, providing a reference for studying design histories in other regions of the world. Hao et al [37] proposed a user demand acquisition method based on patent data mining.…”

Sustainability|Special Issue: Cultural Industries and Sustainable Development

“…The results show that the model can integrate the principles of sustainability into service industries, and that it needs to be verified in future studies. In this Special Issue, we are happy to see contribution 10 make use of IT, by utilizing the Python program language to apply three algorithms to conduct text exploration based on the evolution of theme, diversity, and sustainability for design journals spanning the 1960s to 2020 [12]. The results show the following: in the 1960s-1980s, the evolution of design trends focused on evaluation strategies, technical practices, foreign cultures, digital design, multiculturalism, and design aesthetics, while in the 1990s it focused on emotional human factors, intelligent technology, and local culture.…”