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

Jianping Huang, Yuheng Tao, Minghong Shi () and Jun Wu
Additional contact information
Jianping Huang: School of Fine and Arts, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou 350117, China
Yuheng Tao: Graduate School of Creative Industry Design, National Taiwan University of Arts, New Taipei City 22058, Taiwan
Minghong Shi: Graduate School of Creative Industry Design, National Taiwan University of Arts, New Taipei City 22058, Taiwan
Jun Wu: Department of Digital Media Art, School of Arts and Design, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518061, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 19, 1-22

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.

Keywords: design context; text mining; periodicals; trending topics; trend of diversity; sustainable design; glocalization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/19/12578/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/19/12578/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:19:p:12578-:d:932518

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().