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Festival calendar & AR
Every nation has its own cultural background, and these cultures are unique and rich. As an important part of traditional culture, traditional festivals bear the spiritual culture of the country and ensure social harmony. Young people are the fresh blood of a country and the foundation of the country's future and development. The advent of the fast-developing new media era provides a bridge for linking old-fashioned traditional festival culture with fashionable and avant-garde young people. How new technologies such as AR can attract young people to actively learn about traditional culture and actively participate in and inherit traditional festivals will be discussed in the research. This study focuses on young people's attitudes toward traditional festivals and the current status of traditional Chinese festivals. The purpose and significance of this study are how to combine new technologies with traditional Chinese festivals to enhance modern young people's motivation and participation in traditional festival culture.
This research aims to explore the potential of new technologies to engage young people in traditional festival culture, with the aim to investigate the following question:
How can new technologies (AR/VR?) enhance young people's engagement with traditional Chinese festival culture?
Method & methodology
The study employs a practice-based approach and data collection through both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Previous work in this area was first examined, reviewing the importance and significance of traditional culture in the Middle Ages in relation to the nation and society, while exploring modern youth attitudes toward traditional festivals. A questionnaire was then used to gather information about the extent to which contemporary youth know about traditional festivals and the ways in which they make them more interesting to them. The results of the study led to the development and testing of a design solution to better understand how it actually works and whether it has an impact on young people's perceptions of traditional holidays.
The study included 76 participants from different regions of China. To ensure the age range of participants, questionnaires were distributed at Qingdao Institute of Hotel Management in Shandong Province, China. The total sample included the majority aged between 18 and 28.
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Results
After analyzing the primary and secondary research data, the following conclusions were drawn.
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the festive atmosphere in China is now becoming progressively lighter;
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most young people do not know as much about traditional festivals as they think they do;
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that although they can get free information from the Internet, they do not actively search for the relevant content;
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modern young people are attracted by the holidays and food of traditional festivals and do not pay much attention to the inner meaning of the festivals;
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If there is a new way to show or access traditional festivals, it will attract young people's attention more.
The results are obtained by analyzing the available primary and secondary data and generating some ideas. Initially, more than one solution may be generated, and re-analysis of multiple solutions will help identify the most appropriate solution to this research problem. Of course, all the ideas revolve around the ability to better engage the youth of today to actively understand and participate in traditional Chinese festivals. For example, using the IP of games to associate with traditional festivals, designing festival-related game characters, using blind boxes to attract young people's attention, etc. The final choice was to combine AR with festivals as the best solution for the study.
The initial design of AR and traditional festivals is a cultural and creative product related to traditional festivals that can interact with AR. It can convey the knowledge about the festival at the same time as decoration, so as to play the role of popular science. Inspired by the urban fridge magnet, the final form of the design is a fridge magnet. The refrigerator will be used in People's Daily life. When people open or close the refrigerator, they will be interested in refrigerator stickers. When people scan the fridge magnets, they can take part in an AR interactive knowledge quiz about traditional festivals to gain knowledge about them.
Element
The design of the Fridge magnet incorporates the custom of the Dragon Boat Festival and the elements that the traditional Chinese festival possesses.
The design of the central motif begins with the element of the dragon.
The Dragon Boat Festival comes from the ancient Chinese worship of the
heavens, evolving from the Dragon Totem rituals of ancient times, which later
evolved into a nation-wide totem worship. And the ritual of dragon rituals
from generation to generation gradually led to the custom of dragon boat
paddling. In the south of modern China, dragon boat races are held every
Dragon Boat Festival. This is why the image of the boat on the Fridge magnet
is designed as a dragon, which not only contains the story of the Dragon Boat
Festival's origin, but also represents the Dragon Boat Festival's custom of
dragon boat racing.The dragon element is one of the essential elements of
the Dragon Boat Festival and one of the elements that can represent it.
The second element is the zongzi (rice dumpling). After Qu Yuan jumped into the river, people worried that the fish and crabs in the river would eat Qu Yuan's body, so they wrapped rice balls in leaves from their homes and threw them into the river, hoping that the fish and crabs would not bite Qu Yuan's body after they had eaten their fill.
This leaf-wrapped rice ball is the current Dragon Boat Festival delicacy-zongzi. So the people who choose to use zongzi instead of dragon boat paddling also show that zongzi, a food, is a special food belonging to the Dragon Boat Festival. Zongzi is a steamed food made from glutinous rice wrapped in zongzi leaves, and as a 'special symbol' of the Dragon Boat Festival, people know that the festival is coming up as soon as they see it. As the leaves are green, the Fridge magnet is also an anthropomorphic image of white glutinous rice wrapped in green leaves.
The central element 3 is the colour of the zongzi leaves and the circular pattern covered by the grain. The appearance of the zongzi leaves represents the Dragon Boat Festival and the round shape symbolises reunion and harmony in ancient China. In this design, the circular pattern with the colour of the zongzi leaves indicates that the Dragon Boat Festival has the meaning of family harmony and happiness.
The three elements chosen for the background of the Fridge magnet are auspicious clouds, lanterns and pagodas.
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Lanterns are a traditional Chinese craft, and the red lanterns, symbolising the meaning of reunion, create a festive atmosphere.
The auspicious clouds are an ancient Han Chinese auspicious cloud motif, and its cultural concept has a time span of thousands of years in China, making it a representative Chinese cultural symbol. It signifies auspiciousness and smoothness of mind.
The Memorial arch is one of the characteristic Chinese cultural buildings, which in China are specifically divided into six categories: temple pagodas, merit pagodas, hundred-year-old pagodas (also known as hundred-life pagodas), festival and filial piety pagodas, five-spirited pagodas, and tomb Memorial archs (Zhang Yu-ship, 2011). The historical allusions to Qu Yuan and the filial daughter Cao E in the Dragon Boat Festival also correspond to the Merit and Filial Piety Square.
The design of the Fridge magnet is based on the above six elements, making the view of the Fridge magnet more characteristic of the Dragon Boat Festival and having a certain meaning. It is an intuitive way to let users know what the elements associated with the Dragon Boat Festival are, and also to motivate them to actively search and find out about the festival.
You can try it by MAKAR.
Final out come with AR
Due to the diversified ways in which modern young people have access to information, everyone has different preferences and concerns, and the final result of the design may not capture everyone's excitement. As mentioned in the test, there are many free channels to obtain knowledge about traditional festivals. How to make the design more unique and attract young people's attention and willing to take the initiative to buy it is very important and worth thinking about. While refrigerators are something everyone needs in their lives, fridge magnets are not. Cost included, fridge magnets may not end up being particularly cheap. This may result in only those who are interested in traditional festivals choosing to buy them, which is likely to cause the solution to fail in practicality.
To solve these problems and adopt the suggestions made after testing, some new ideas were generated around the presentation of AR combined with traditional festivals. After exploring several possible solutions, the final project was designed as a calendar app that allows for AR interaction - "Holiday Calendar". Compared with buying refrigerator stickers, the app format is more acceptable. Calendar as a common APP exists in almost everyone's cell phone. People can't live their daily life without calendar, it can do the most basic query date, trip record, schedule management, special date reminder (holiday, anniversary or user-set date, etc.). So the AR interaction of traditional festivals will be displayed in the form of calendar APP will be more convenient for people to choose. The holiday calendar includes the functions that the basic calendar can do, and additionally adds the AR scanning function. When users scan the illustration of the festival, they can participate in the AR interaction related to the festival day and gain knowledge about the festival from the interaction process. This is a way to get young people's attention and eventually to interest them and actively acquire knowledge, thus increasing their participation in traditional Chinese festival culture.
New Idea
To be continue...