Aesthetics research of Chinese traditional lamps and lanterns using product semantics

Abstract

As globalization accelerates, local product designs from the United States, Europe, or even Japan and South Korea reflect more of the aesthetic psychology and features of their own nations. Despite the globalization of the natural resources, market, and labor force, these countries put more efforts to make their product design localized. However, designers in China do not pay much attention to China’s local culture. Thereof, it will be difficult for products lack of cultural elements to satisfy Chinese people’s psychological needs, let alone to stand out of competitive global market. With traditional Chinese lamps and lanterns as a case study, we explored traditional Chinese and modern product design and their approaches respectively, and proposed ‘product modeling semantics’ as a new language representation. Applying traditional Chinese pattern into lamp and lantern design, we conducted in-depth studies on the application of traditional Chinese culture into modern product design with the use of product semantics appropriately. Proper integration of product semantics into product design can let traditional culture yield unusually brilliant results with modern design methods. By incorporating outstanding culture and long civilization and history, modern design will be endowed with more profound cultural deposits and broader space for revelation.