This year’s YouFab2016 Kick off series events started from Tokyo, Japan. After a series of inspired, exciting activities in Bangkok, Barcelona and ​​Toulouse, we had finally arrived at the last stop: Taipei!

The event in Taipei was a bit different to the format in other FabCafe. For creating more opportunities to meet up people who love design and support innovative ideas. We had split the event into two parts: exhibition and forum. We had joined the 10-day Taiwan’s annual design event “Taiwan Designers’ Week” from Sep.23~Oct.2, and held a forum during the exhibition period to introduce everyone to the concept of YouFab Global Creative Awards 2016 ,and YouFab2016 special award, the Yamaha Award with the theme  “The switch to your emotions”.

For enabling us to carry out the event in this format, we are grateful to FabCafe Tokyo for its assistance (thanks Mariko and Daiki!!) and to AgIC and Mr Yusuke Oono for their generous loan of exhibit items to us in Taiwan. They have greatly enriched the exhibition area and attracted many spectators and thereby enhanced the public’s curiosity and understanding of the substance of the YouFab!

Currently in its tenth year, Taiwan Designers’ Week is an annual large-scale exhibition. Visitors to the exhibition range from members of the general public, design-faculty students, university teachers to industry designers and attendees from overseas. This opportunity has enabled us to meet with a wide range of people who love design and support innovative ideas.

Many children from gifted mathematics classes also came to see the exhibition. After hearing about YouFab and being introduced to the previous award-winning works, many of the children had indicated that they want to use AgIC to make things. Their knowledge of digital manufacturing was absolutely astonishing as well. We look forward to their future works and urge them to remember to submit their entries here!

The second part of the Kick Off Event—the forum, was held in the afternoon on Oct.1.

The forum’s theme was “Fab Tomorrow” and we were very honored to invite Mr Shih Wei-Chieh, a new media artist who was the finalist in YouFab2015, and Mr Chang Keng-hau of “Luxury Logico”, a collective comprised of four artists that has created a large number of large-scale works and performances. They were there to share their works and their thoughts about FAB. Daiki Kanaoka of FabCafe Tokyo and Tim of FabCafe Taipei were also there to introduce the concepts of YouFab and FabCafe to the participants.

Tim, co-founder of FabCafe Taipei, introduced to everyone the core concepts and global network of FabCafe. He also shared one of 2016’s representative project, “Smart Craft Studio Camp”(Hida, Japan)’s experience and outcome.

Daiki Kanaoka, the FAB engineer of FabCafe Tokyo as our special guest to help with the Kick off event in Taipei, gave a detailed introduction about the submission criteria of the YouFab Global Creative Awards and the previous award-winning works. He explained to the audience about the theme of YAMAHA Special Prize ——”The switch to your emotions”. His concise explanation of the previous winning entries gave everyone a clearer understanding of this year’s redefined concept of “Fab = creativity that transcends and combines the digital and physical realms.”

Speaker Shih Wei Chieh gave us a talk about this year in an international workshop in collaboration with Spanish architects by using laser dyed fabrics. He explained that his reason for choosing to apply new media in the traditional fields of weaving and embroidery dyeing is because he hopes to create greater social dialogues through the communication between new technologies and traditional industries.

Speaker Chang Keng-hau (Luxury Logico) shared  “The Poem of the Sun”, a large-scale mechanical gear installation set up this year in the Taiwan Taipower Building. Because Luxury Logico has accumulated many works that span across theater, film, dance, architecture and pop music, they are very diverse and experienced with their cross-border cooperative digital manufacturing tools. In this short talk, Keng-hau made a simple classification of the types of digital manufacturing tools used in previous works so that the audience can have a better understanding of the possibility of digital manufacturing.

After the forum, some members of the audience were still interested in lingering and chatting with us. We thank everyone for their enthusiastic participation and helping us bring this event to a successful conclusion. We hope that this series of events has enabled more people to know about YouFab and FabCafe. We also look forward to receiving submissions from more designers who are interested in the YouFab Global Creative Awards!