Made In Taiwan

DESIGN: TO MOST PEOPLE, "Made in Taiwan" means microchips, reliable if dull laptops and huge Taiwanese companies in Guangdong making anonymous components for Apple and Nokia at giant firms such as Foxconn.

The strength of Taiwan’s original equipment manufacturer (OEM) sector is the rock on which the self-ruled island’s economy is built. But as competition intensifies within the region, especially from neighbouring China, Taiwan’s thoughts are turned to design and innovation for the future.

“For the past 30 years, Taiwan factories have been OEM plants. There are less original brands that are well known,” says graphic designer Xiao Qing-yang, who has earned four Grammy Award nominations for his design work on music packaging. “But now things are different. All my teachers, classmates, friends, especially the young ones, all they talk about is brands. We’ve seen a lot of the profit a brand could bring to a business from the western world, and now it’s the time to build up our own brands and let them go out into the world.”

Taiwan is pushing hard to move up the value chain, and industry and state authorities are sponsoring design institutes to boost the country’s innovative output and upgrade Taiwanese brands. This means a strong focus on product design, industrial design, graphic design and interior design as it focuses on the original brand manufacturer (OBM) sector.

Taiwan is a self-ruled island of 23 million people, established when Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang lost the civil war with Chairman Mao Zedong’s communists and fled across the Strait in 1949.

China still considers breakaway Taiwan a renegade province, but under the presidency of Ma Ying-jeou business links have prospered, and there are two million Taiwanese living on the mainland, many of them moving their manufacturing operations there.

Fashion designer Lilin Hsu has co-founded the Xue Xue design institute with her partner, industry tycoon PS Lin, in order to cultivate cultural and creative talent, help establish original brands in Taiwan and foster appreciation for aesthetics in Taiwan, she says.

“Taiwan has 17 design institutes, 18 art academies, 5,000 art graduates annually, and 8,000 design graduates that enter the greater China job market annually.

“We have a large talent pool in greater China. Designers from around the world will need to begin to understand oriental colour preferences, lifestyle and consumer trends. Therefore if we can invest energy into researching Asian designs that evolve around the Asian lifestyle, this gives us an opportunity to develop distinctive Chinese brands,” says Hsu.

“Taiwan connected to the international arena 30-40 years earlier than mainland China. Taiwan’s first- and second-generation enterprises have assumed contract manufacturing roles, but the majority of third-generation enterprises have gained international exposure.”

“Many young people are learning more about creative fields and thus we will see an explosion of creative energy in the next generation, which will not only boost Taiwan’s soft economy, but also influence consumer trends and people’s lifestyle in the Greater China market,” she says.

The changing nature of manufacturing means that Taiwan has had to start to think of ways to gain competitive advantage.

“In Taiwan all major high-quality, high-price goods have been made here. But no matter how strong we are in manufacturing, the factories are moving to China. It’s just like in Europe, they saw their manufacturing move eastwards,” says Linber Huang, deputy chief executive of the Taiwan Design Center.

“In Taiwan, we decided to think about how we would create what we call ‘intangible culture’. Design helps products look beautiful, and it also helps lifestyle. More and more, products must deliver something that helps with the lifestyle. Everyone knows Louis Vuitton, for example, but it shows that it is about more than being useful or high-tech,” says Huang. “At the National Design Centre we look at all aspects of design. Design is not just about exports, design is for life.”

Taiwanese design institutes are starting to make everything from shoes to clothes to furniture to computers to software.

Take Asus, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of portable PCs.

The company has focused on enhancing its competitive advantage by opting for some high-end design.

It teamed up with designer Karim Rashid for a series of fashionable netbooks, while the Asus NX90 laptop was designed in conjunction with style gurus Bang Olufsen and designer David Lewis.

A classic example is the WX-Lamborghini, which is trimmed out with leather side panels, cut angle lines, and of course, the Lamborghini Raging Bull on the front.

But this is not a car – it’s a computer mouse.

The track wheel is replaced by what looks like the tread you’d find on a real Lamborghini’s race tyres and the front fascia mirrors the design of the Reventón’s characteristic trapezoidal rear vents.

“I had a dream when I was very little, because at that time Taiwan was going through the transformation from an agriculture-based economy to the industrial economy, but it was too early to talk about the importance of cultural expression,” says Xiao. “But I saw a strength coming from the people and tradition, and I thought the combination between this and design could help boost Taiwan’s future economy.”

“This is the future of design in Taiwan. Until now, Chinese brands were not strong enough, so we need to do more to build up brand value. We also need to look at our ability to be creative and original. We need to make sure design gets enough oxygen,” he says.

Taiwan won 92 prestigious Red Dot Awards for product design this year, including six “best of the best” awards for products of the highest design quality. This put Taiwan ahead of regional giants Japan and South Korea.

Meanwhile at the iF Product Design Awards, which were announced at the CeBIT electronics fair in March, seven of the 50 products chosen overall for the gold award were Taiwanese, behind only design giants Germany and Japan.

The iF design awards also lists the top 100 companies and 12 of them are Taiwanese, including Asus, Qisda and Mitac.

The iF awards are important to Taiwan’s design industry. They look to see how countries such as Korea have built on these kinds of awards. One example is Samsung in Korea, which transformed itself from OEM to a recognisable household brand in the 1990s after winning the award.

One of the winners was Just Mobile, which makes Apple peripherals.

Managing director of Just Mobile, Erich Huang, told Taiwan Panorama that the award helped in boosting the company’s reputation and image as it tried to break into foreign markets.

The company is seven years old and three years ago began working on building a brand. Within their first year they had moved out of OEM and revenues were booming. Taiwanese designs are creeping into our consciousness, even though we may not always be aware of them.

A Taiwanese designer came up with the pedestrian crossing lights seen throughout the island, featuring a countdown and an animated “little green man” who runs faster when the light is about to turn red. This design has since spread to the US, Germany and Japan.

According to data from the Council of Cultural Affairs, there were a total of 2,470 design companies – including product, graphic, website, and other forms of design – in Taiwan in 2009, with a total annual revenue of NT$71.2 billion (€1.73 billion). This year, Taiwan will host the 2011 Taipei World Design Expo as part of its Year of Design.

Vivian Wu, head of the strategic planning section at the Taiwan Design Center, believes that Taiwan’s strengths in design are being appreciated more and more.

“There is plenty of talent in the design field in Taiwan, and they are increasingly appreciated by the international community. As this strength in design grows, design and innovation help traditional industries find new opportunities and challenges,” says Wu.

“The power of design and innovation is also changing the management model, not only of product manufacturing but in the services sector too,” she says.

Wu says the government has been trying to facilitate getting designers and industry together, giving them a platform to co-operate, to break some of the old rules of manufacturing industry and insert new design ideas to give Taiwanese firms a competitive advantage.

“The importance of design is being recognised more and more, especially in the past four or five years,” says Wu.

Crucially, the mass market is showing that it appreciates better design by buying the products.

“But business people in Taiwan also recognise how important design is to their products as they see how design ideas can really sweeten the output from the production lines,” she says.

The Design Center has been busily promoting “Branding Taiwan”, and the design-service and design-brand business is growing, trying to sell Taiwanese identity internationally.

“Although Taiwan is a small island, it is really international now. I can see the design industry will have a brilliant future. Plus we already have the technology base, the design talents, and the heads of industry have accepted the concept of design as important, and are backing us,” she says.