The Creation for the Image of Shadow Puppet — The Cultural Product Design as Example

[[abstract]]There are three main puppet theater art forms in Taiwan: shadow puppet show, palmar drama, and string puppet show. Among these different puppet shows, shadow puppet achieves its special art style for the carving shape, color applying technique and the combination of shadow and light reflection performing style. The new generation media (such as movies and TV) has been popularized nowadays. It's very easy to access various of entertainment that brings people sensory excitement, which results in decreasing great amount of traditional theater audience. Under the current competitive and constantly changing business system, these performing art that aims for entertainment will lose their stage over new entertainment media form. The audience will be shrinking and the art culture will not even be survived unless they get the support from the government. This study takes successful cultural products case as example, discussing how to find the visual element and symbolic meaning of shadow puppet and apply the result in the cultural product design process and developing cultural creative product that matches consumer's preference. Other than exploring shadow puppet theater area, we also explore the possibility of creating economical value in the market. The theme of this thesis will discuss creation motives and purpose. By analyzing cultural creative industry policies, shadow puppet visual shape features cultural creative product design model and related cultural product case analysis, this study summarizes the thinking levels that designing cultural creative product needs. The levels are external look level, the user behavior mode and inner culture meaning and value. Besides applying these thinking levels to design process and explore with it. We can also recommend designer to survey the culture feature and then think about usability and functionality and finally realize and execute the product design with concrete shape and beauty before developing their cultural product. After discussing in this study, the final stage of the creation should be taking Taiwan traditional shadow puppet art as inner core of culture meaning and value. Through the product design process, we can explore the best presenting form of shadow puppet product design and taking usability into consideration, further come to design result with great visual look.