Hi, I'm Tzuyun Wei,
designer and illustrator with a strong focus on bridging between independent voice and public experience.
Reach out → bushwa1998@gmail.com
Taiwan Zine LibraryUX and web design for digital archive of 1000+ zine preservation in Taiwan
Taiwan Zine Library for Taiwan Study Research Center is a digital archives project of over 1000 zines, independent magazines from the island from 1949 to present, aiming to provide abundant historical resources for long-term international and domestic researchers. The UI design and information architecture of the project, focusing on the informative service and clear navigation in archives browsing experience.
Fruit Portrait
Turn fruit purchasing into self-embracing journey
Fruit Portrait is an event designed for Farm To Campus in Pratt Institute started in Fall 2020. Farm To Campus is a program introducing products grown primarily by regional farmers and sourced through GrowNYC. For the upcoming orientation on Campus, Farm To Campus have the potential to broaden the community members, and there is a need for a dynamic experience to meet the newcomers. As a result, Fruit Portrait is designed for Farm To Campus to enhance customer engagement and visibility.
Process
Phase 1 - Understand
To define the need and core value of the program, I analyze Farm To Campus with three C's: Category, Customer, Competitor.
Category
Farm To Campus program in NYC was created to connect schools with local farms and food producers to strengthen local agriculture, improve student health, and promote regional food systems awareness. Various programs bring more local, nutritious, seasonally-varied meals depending on the technical collaboration with different organization.
Customer
As for Farm To Campus in Pratt, the millennials are the main age group and participants, that are committed to health conscious, and embrace social experiences and spirituality. Buying local fruit for them is not only a daily routine, but also a way to express their social consciousness and to connect with local farms and communities.
Competitor
Most of the similar programs promote with values such as cooking & organic lifestyle, healthy school life, regional food systems awareness. In social media, they rely on informational posts, such as food facts, how-to recipes and farm tours. To differentiate from these categories, I decided to create unique experience to generate the charming image and preference for Farm To Campus in Pratt.
Phase 2 - Research & Collect
To identify the fruit-related culture, I interviewed communities in the Clinton Hill area, where most customers live. The interview was divided into two parts. First was the experience of fruit-related culture; the second was the opinion questions: “What kind of fruit do you think you? Why?”
Cultural Insight: In art and literature, fruits are often applied as symbols, ranging from sex, power, intimacy to nationality. Fruits also become autobiographical message in digital cultures, especially in social media, such as fruit filters and fruit quiz. In human interaction, fruits are cross-culture and self-deprecated, and are the language for people to express and communicate.
Coding & AnalyzeAfter receiving the interviews’ feedback, I coded them in 6 tags: Process, Inside, Environment, Flavor, Outside, Feeling & Personality. Besides, there’re similar answers and statements between different respondents, such as “soft inside,” “I love me,” and “multiple selves.”
Phase 3 - Define
Fruit Portrait is an event designed for Farm To Campus in Pratt during the 2021 Fall semester. As the newcomers and students back on campus, Fruit Portrait delivers the ethnographical perspective of Pratt Community and aims for connection, self-expression, and shared spirit through Farm To Campus.
Connection
Though we're different in shape, grow-up background, perception, we reflect the similarity with each other.
Self-expression
Fruit Portrait embraces self-expression and diverse human-nature.
Shared spirit
By engaging Farm To Campus, we share our support, life style and become part of community.
Phase 4 - Design
Through systemize and coding the results, I transformed the interaction into the physical medium: the PLU stickers, as a customized data visualization. Through transforming the feedback into stickers and catalog, Fruit Portrait provides an alternative perspective in purchasing local produces.
Taiwan Mineral Show 2021Branding design for biggest mineral show in Taiwan
Taiwan Mineral Show is a semiannual event in Taiwan and is held to spread the knowledge of the field to the wide audience, ranging from students, jewelry designers to amateurs. The branding system is inspired by the mining process. Through observing the landscape and digging out minerals and classify them into different genre by the collecting box, human discover the beauty of mineral nature.
Mask as Photo MediaBroadsheet design and writing for Exhibition Wearing Masks
Masks as Photomedia
Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks in The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Masks are defined as the representation through the portraying process, by tracing down, producing into artifacts, and utilizing in scenarios for people to recognize the “face”, and with the cultural formation, masks transformed into an image of a face that proves the spiritual existence. In Gillian Wearing’s works, she tells stories through photography and extends the essentials of photo media through masks.In Ms. Wearing’s group portrait Sixty Minute Silence(1996), 26 actors in the uniforms of a local constabulary, are arranged in an authoritative posture for 60 minutes. In the installation, the artist integrated the concept of daguerreotypes and dramatized the long exposure to extend the frozen moment. In Snapshot (2005), which featured 7 framed monitors containing a looped video of women and girls from different stages of life, Ms. Wearing used long video takes of subjects maintaining steady poses that are similar to those pictures found in a family photo album.In mass media culture, the frozen image is often identified as a simple signifier of the memory that evokes and freezes collective emotions. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes analyzes the two layers of still image: the Studium, the cultural and linguistic interpretation of the photograph; the Punctum, the personal meaning of the image, which points to the features that produce or convey meaning without invoking any recognizable symbolic system. Beyond the desirable projections, Punctum, arising from the uncontrolled details in the image when the audience repudiates all knowledge and forms a personal interaction with the photograph, is the fundamental nature of the photographic medium. If we state the moment-freezing ability in photography that embalms the time and stage of life, then in Snapshots, the artist leaves viewers on the edge of past, present, and future, renegotiating the nature of time in photo media (McKenzie, 2005). Overviewing Ms. Wearing’s works, the punctum, the freezing-moment functionality of image machines that leads viewers closer to the qualities of these documented, two-dimensional proofs of existence, is further extended to another solid art form, masks.
Object/Materiality
As objects in the past, masks were mainly made for temporary scenarios of preying, worship, celebration, exorcism, etc, which led to another essential, the transitoriness. In the native tribes, with the wooden ceremonial masks and specific customs, priests incarnated as the spirit from the supernatural world and returned to humans once they took off the masks. In the ritualistic aspect, the make-up also worked in the same way that offers us the opportunity for transcendence, a mental and physical shift.
History/Context
Masks can also be defined as the representation through the portraying process, by tracing down, producing, and utilizing in scenarios for people to recognize the “face,” and with the cultural formation, masks transformed into an image of a face that proves the spiritual existence.
