Story
2019 was the year many stone industry enterprisers in Hualien passed the torch to the youngsters of their second or even third generations, who expressed eagerness for brand building and innovative design. “Back to Original” has been set as the start and end vision of the 2019 Hualien International Stone Workshop by the curator team HEY SHENG with this strong desire and need hence became the foundation and enabled to organize of the technical and design resources as well as bringing stone enterprises together to jointly establish an industry cluster. Combine the cultural technology with the particularity of emotional craft, which shows the superiority to make design sustainable. Discovers more diverse sides of stone materials by bringing emotions and warmth to crafts and designs.
The entire program puts cultural and technological strengths together and brings the focus back to the original values of the raw materials. Designers with experiences in mass production joined forces with stone manufacturers, utilizing the idea of “Micro Production” between customization and mass production and therefore taking Taiwan into a new “stone brand generation”. Taiwan's stone brands will be able to exhibit the width and depth of their energies, extend their design capacities, and promoting them to collaborate with diverse global industries in terms form a positive cycle for the industry chain.
All participants should be in strategic thinking. Both the industry with skillful techniques as well as industrial designers with mass production experiences had to start from diverse perspectives and, instead of completing single creative pieces, integrate their own professional manufacturing or designing ideas with Micro Production and come up with proposals that meet market demands. This is a brand new territory for the local stone industry and hence the theme of the 2019 Hualien International Stone Workshop, fully displaying the compounded potentials and values between the stone industry and brand designs in Taiwan. All participants made great strides via 4+1 steps in the workshop, and the Micro Production is the pathway leading to the program's outstanding results, and the indispensable players are the stone industry and industrial designers that have partnered up at the Workshop. The industry contributes manufacturing strengths and processing challenges, while the designers bring in observations, ideas, and inspirations. The power of design has been at full force throughout the entire program, from entering stone factories, searching the true nature of the stone materials with designers, to introducing designers' capacities in crafts, mass production, and technology at different processing stages to explore material characteristics. Based on micro-production, stone enterprises' foresight in markets and environmental protection, the strong supply chains provided by partnering manufacturers, and designers' expertise in customization and mass production, are all combined to showcase the stone industry's strengths and increase product values.
