Starting Out is a series about designers who have recently struck out on their own. More than a string of studio visits, the articles profile talented, risk-taking professionals all around the world. We hope their anecdotes will inspire your own entrepreneurial spirit.
In our third installment, we visit Alice Wang in Taipei, Taiwan. We met her first at the world famous dumpling house Din Tai Fung, and then at her studio, where after only one year, she has a large team of employees under her wing and a brand new magazine to boot.
Top: Alice Wang and her studio bunch, wearing a set of laser cut glasses made to surprise Alice on her birthday. Bottom: An image of Controlled Experiments, a series of design projects in the spirit of science fairs.
Core77: Alice, tell us about your studio practice.
Alice Wang:: I have a background in product design and interaction design and a childhood dream to become an artist, so as a result, I think what I’m doing now is a mixture of all three.
Instead of designing products that solves problem, I use design as a language to illustrate stories, social trends, common issues seen among us; to observe and remind people about issues left hidden or forgotten; use parody and irony to ask people to laugh and self-reflect.
Alice takes us on a tour of her impressive studio, just a year old.
C77: How and why did you first start out?
AW: I started out by accident. I had to ship my project to Milan for Salone Satellite and it was too heavy to ship it as an individual, so I registered my company asap just so I can get those boxes to Europe.
C77: Your practice is very diverse. Tell us about all its different facets.
AW: My company is loosely divided into 5 parts:
Research & Collectables: On the side, we work on a wide range of self-initiated research projects, and sometimes, the outcome turns into a design collectable or an installation for gallery and museums.
The Binder: A new magazine we started on April Fool’s Day this year, it mainly focuses on art, design, fashion, psychology, social trend analysis. The magazine has three holes and comes with a binder hoping to encourage readers to tear out pages and reorganize them when archiving them into the Binder.
Controlled Experiments: With this series, we’re aiming to merge the process of scientific experiments into the design process. Each project starts off with a hypothesis and goes through data collection and observation before it researches the analysis and conclusion procedure. We’re not sure what the outcome of each product will be as it may be influenced by the participants and the data collected.
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