To Calculate The Curved Face-A Study Of The Designing For Contemporary Tin-Made Commodity

The decline of Chinese traditional folk handicraft is attributed to a number of factors. Apart from a historical shift from a agricultural production mode into a industrial one, an inflexible habit of sticking to conventional art rules and a narrow inheritance of skills from generation to generation on the other hand contributes to the general recession. In the creation of Chinese traditional handicraft, it is a core idea that the artist must “calculate the curved face and see where the material fits”, which, if one is to trace the origin, may have to look into the attention that Chinese traditional artists paid to not only how technics would be applied to the shaping of certain crafts but how the changes in environment and lifestyle might have altered the value to be expected as well, and which, however, has withered degenerated into mere means, instead of to ‘create’, to ‘produce’. This thesis, therefore, is aimed at putting a second emphasis and analysis on what it means to ‘calculate the curved face and see where the material fits”.Taking tin-made commodities as a carrier of both theoretical and practical research, this thesis, through comparison with ancient tinwork, field research, interviews with craftsmen, case studies as well as personal experiments, is to explore the possibility of a transformation of Chinese traditional handicraft, while injecting new nutrition into that old yet invaluable idea, proposing for design the principle of clinging to harmony with the times, re-building elegant and exquisite characteristics, following adaptive functional consideration and thus switching to meet modern material demand and aesthetic requirement.