Employing Poetry Culture for Creative Design with a Polyphonic Pattern

With the global village approaching a new era of aesthetic economy powered by culture creative, every country is actively seeking inspirational resources for culturally creative product design. Chinese traditional poetry, full of expression created with poets’ fascinating words and still highly appreciated today, carries not only our predecessors’ wisdom but also principles which correspond to those for modern creative design. This study starts with the distinctive features of our classical poetry, lays its foundation on traditional theory of Chinese poetry, consults literature regarding the feasibility of employing poetry for cultural creative design, and furthers the trend for such application through investigating current case studies. Further, by integrating related theories of the western Ingarden Phenomenology from

Cognition of the Literary Work of Art

and Chinese construction from

The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons

, this study adopts the organic formation of ‘level of word’, ‘level of phrase’ and ‘level of sentence’ for analyses and conversion, employs the concept of ‘polyphonic pattern’ as a guideline, and develops a step by step concrete process for exploring how the internal meaning and external form in traditional poetry could be transferred and integrated into modern design. With further illustration of actual implemented cases, a model framework for employing poetry culture for creative design is thus completed. In addition to its being a significant and feasible reference for culture creative design, we would like to see this model cause our traditional poetry to shine with a new glamour as well.