four

I have made it to Tainan! Over the past few days I have been exploring Tainan and its offerings. Overall, I can confidently say that I prefer Tainan over the other cities I have visited in Taiwan. I think that there are a few contributors to this. For one, I have gotten used to Taiwan and its weather, so I can comfortably walk around and not feel annoyed by the heat or the rain. Though, the weather here is a little better than Taipei year round, having much more sun. The vibe here is also much more slow and relaxed. I think there is an indescribably energy that feels more relaxed than Taipei that gives me a “vacation” feeling. I think there is an also a friend accept to it, as I am also connecting more with the NCKU students than the NTU students. Being able to find that cross cultural connection because of mutual interest in design fashion and/or art has made me feel more comfortable in this city. The food that they have been showing us has also been the best food I have eaten so far. One beef soup restaurant that I tried tonight was genuinely one of the best things I have ever eaten, beating almost every restaurant on my restaurant ranking app (the only one that it didn’t beat is my favorite Italian restaurant in New York, MAMO). They really weren’t lying when they said that Tainan is a dream city for foodies.

Today was my free day, I went fabric shopping with Helen, Erin and Kristin. I tried to go fabric shopping in Taipei but we arrived right when the shops were closing down so I never got much time to look around, only leaving with some fabric and nothing of note. Thus today I bought a lot more special fabric, specifically a lot of brocade fabric that I want to use in my fashion designs. These types of fabrics are often priced very high in the United States at prices of almost 40 dollars a yard for fully polyester brocade. That same fabric here is also 6 dollars a yard. I picked up almost 6 yards today’s. I also found a lot of cheap satin and cotton that would have costed double from the US. I am very happy with my haul. 

An example of brocade (Sahni Fabs)

Yesterday was a class day, and we learned about circular design. We also finalized our project group and started to think about what product we wanted to design with our group. The lecture that day was interesting to me as I had never heard of circular design before. I learned about how circular design is this process of purposefully designing products in a way that encourages users and manufacturing to follow a non linear process of distribution. For example, instead of mining new materials, we can use old materials from the discards of the same product. We can also encourage users to reuse the product or give it away so someone else can use it. Anything to steer away from the environmentally damaging linear process of gathering new materials, producing something with usually a lot of waste, letting the user use the product, then discarding the product or parts of the product, causing more waste than before. I learned that there are a lot of ways to make a product cycle circular, from smaller loops within the users life to bigger loops involving the collection of product waste or repairing of a product through external means.