Cultural Ergonomics Beyond Culture - The Collector as Consumer in Cultural Product Design John Kreifeldt 1 , Yuma Taru 2 , Ming-Xean Sun 3 , and Rungtai Lin 2( ✉ ) 1 Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA john.Kreifeldt@tufts.edu 2 Graduate School of Creative Industry Design, National Taiwan University of Arts, Ban Ciao City, Taipei 22058, Taiwan lihan.workshop@gmail.com, rtlin@mail.ntua.edu.tw 3 Institute of Applied Arts, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan buddasfox@gmail.com Abstract. The purpose of this study is to explore the meaning of cultural objects and to extract their cultural features from Taiwan’s aboriginal culture. This paper attempts to illustrate how by enhancing the original meaning and images of Taiwan aboriginal culture features and by taking advantage of new production technology, they may be transformed into modern products and so fulfill the needs of the contemporary consumer market. The gungu, literally “weaving box”, in the Atayal aboriginal language, was chosen as the cultural object for this study. The paper focuses on and analyzes the weaving box’s appearance, usability, cultural meaning, operational interface, and the scenario in which it is used. Then, this article intends to create an interface for examining the way designers commu‐ nicate across cultures as well as the interwoven experience of design and culture in the design process. Keywords: Cultural ergonomics · Weaving box · Cross cultural design · Taiwan aboriginal culture 1 Introduction Designing local features into products appears to be more and more important in the global market where products are losing their identity because of similarities in tech‐ nology, function, and form. Cultural features then are considered to be unique characters to embed into a product both for the enhancement of its identity in the global market and for the fulfilment of the individual consumer’s experiences (Hsu et al. 2013). Using local features in design fields as a strategy to create product identity in the global market, the designer has noted the importance of associating products with cultural features in order to enhance product value (Lin 2009). At this point, the field of Industrial Design has played an important role in embedding cultural elements into products and in increasing cultural value in the global competitive product market. Therefore, designing a product with local features in order to emphasize its cultural value has become a critical issue in the design process (Hsu et al. 2011). © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 P.-L.P. Rau (Ed.): CCD 2016, LNCS 9741, pp. 355–364, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40093-8_36