Research And Practice Of Hangzhou City Gift Design

This dissertation focuses on the study of city culture from the perspective ofinvestigating a well-known tea gift, the dragon well tea, in Hangzhou. The authorchooses this topic as the research focus: the culture of gift design in Hangzhou. Interms of the reasons for choosing this subject, it can be explained as follows: a city’scharacter and manner can be understood through studying its gifts; and a city’saesthetic conception and philosophical thoughts can be deduced from understandingone of its particular products. However, nowadays, the local development of city giftsis not satisfied. Hangzhou, as a representative of the cultural landscape and the worldheritage city, is an appropriate specimen worthy of investigating and analyzing. Thisdissertation works on exploring the cultural fragments which posses growth potentialand time significance, from the cultural history represented by the Southern SongDynasty to the natural landscape represented by the west lake, through probing intoHangzhou’s geographical location, natural environment, cultural landscape, historicalcontext, characteristics of resources, etc. Besides, this dissertation explores the corefactors and aesthetic factors, accordance with the cultural traits of Hangzhou, byemploying the deductive method, and adopts west lake dragon well tea for gift use as acarrier, which aims to form the unification of inner and outer parts, by combining the“object” with local features and the “utensils” with urban esthetics. This dissertationemploys the characteristic analysis as the main research method, lists the elements inaccordance with the traits of west lake dragon well tea for gift use, and makes a designtransformation and combination from “city” to “utensils” through classifying andcreating the ideal model. At last, through designing the “utensils”, designers couldsuccessfully communicate their inner feelings with users, realizing the unification ofcognition, aesthetics, operation and cultural identity, as well as achieving the designideas that utensils can be used to hold philosophy and therefore conveying this city’slife philosophy through this kind of gift set.