In Search of Wabi-Sabi
In 2019, I spent one month in Japan to search for the traditional culture, wabi-sabi in Japan. While I was in Japan, I visited the traditional temples, architecture and attended the tea ceremony. Also, I visited the teamlab and saw the premises of combining advanced technology and traditional culture. After I came back, I created three explorational designs to explore how to bring Wabi-Sabi, creative coding, and augmented reality together.
About
The first illustrational poster focused on comparing the tea culture in China and Japan after conducting several research iterations.
The second generative form design focused on the exploration of creating the shapes of zen and sakura flower, the two elements in Wabi-Sabi, by using creative coding.
The final design compiles the above exploration into a handmade illustrative interactive book with an augmented reality effect that brings users into the wabiーsabi world.
Shape of Zen.
This is inspired by the 円相 (enso), a misshapen circle usually drawn by brushstroke. It represents the togetherness, the beauty of imperfection (wabi sabi) and an introspective mind state in zen.
In this section, I created an interactive piece that allows people to have their zen moment by generating the ‘enso’ via their hand gensture.
An interactive book with Augmented reality
Finally, I combined all of my explorations into
an interactive book and use Vuforia SDK and Unity to create an Augmented reality effect in order to bring an immersive reading experience
for people..
This project is unique and worth further developments. What is the future of ancient and traditional culture? Will the development of technology help protect them? I hope to find out the answers in my future design studies