The Heaviest Record

As a Taiwanese industrial product designer, I have noticed that plastic products are ubiquitous in our daily lives because of their malleable nature. However, after years of designing, I began questioning the authenticity and significance of the forms I created. Were they just artificial manipulations created for the sake of excitement and the system, or did they have genuine meaning?

I began to wonder how the industry creates forms without considering factors such as location, time, and the world outside of factories. I wanted to create forms that naturally and inherently reflected the time and location of production and sought to find meaning in the industrialized production system.

After discussing with professors at KISD, I came up with the idea of creating forms that changed with the sunlight of the day. This would fully link the end product with the production process and even serve as a record of the location of production.

The sun's movement became a symbol of the day, representing all the events and meanings of that day. This inspired me to take a neutral documenting approach to my project. I found this method powerful not only because of its bias-free storytelling ability but also because it is a progressive direction for product design.

Topic

My idea is to use a machine to record the movement of the sun by focusing its rays to melt material and create a form that serves as evidence of this movement. I want to use the form to highlight cultural differences and how the meaning of sunlight has changed for modern people. I apply wax on a metal stick with bearings, and the balance changes when the sun melts the wax, causing it to rotate.

Issue

The sun is the heaviest material in our reachable world, and my goal is to visualize its movement as evidence. Compared to the subject, the visualization part is unbelievably light. By showing the evidence, we can understand the "heavy" through the "light." Throughout history, humans have used various methods to record the passing of a day, from making knots to carving marks. Today, we rely on computers and clocks, and the concept of time and the sun has become detached. We tend to focus on the numbers on the clock rather than the position of the sun. For people living in different latitudes, the sun is merely an object that brings longer days in the summer and shorter ones in the winter.

Process

Initially, I focused on adjusting the machine and finding the right material. I experimented with various materials and observed their melting patterns under sunlight. I eventually settled on wax and built simple structures to control and melt the wax using sunlight. However, due to the weather conditions in Cologne, I had to use a spotlight from the equipment office. Although the process worked well, I wasn't satisfied with the artificial light source. In the middle of the semester, I became sidetracked with building a "perpetual motion machine," but I later realized that the concept of a "compound eye" was more relevant. I learned that western design thinking is all about "control."

Result

The wax melted piece by piece, but the machine still had some precision issues. I had to adjust the angle of the machine occasionally because of the deviation that occurred at 4 PM. I still don't have a solution for this problem, and my German friend Kath remarked that maybe it's just the nature of things, and we can't really control it. "Control" is like a game that people play to establish order and meaning out of chaos.

Experience

This semester, I had the opportunity to learn about how western designers think and execute their designs, which is quite different from the approach in Asia, where we usually brainstorm ideas on paper and then make mockups or draft models. Western designers, on the other hand, think by doing. This is also reflected in the way people discuss and communicate. Eastern designers tend to hide their thinking and only reveal the end product without proper explanation. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, depending on the people you work with. Since I worked alone this semester, it was a valuable experience to observe and learn as an "outsider."

Köln International School of Design,

Köln, Germany

Teacher/

Prof. Andreas Muxel

Prof. Carolin Höfler

Thanks/

Cindy Lee

Brenda Olalde

Hei-Wa Wong

Ping-Ni Chen

Yu-Ming Tsai

Eckhardt Selbach (Metal Workshop)