The Design Story of Yunyou Dunhuang Product Design

The Design Story of Yunyou Dunhuang Product Design

2020｜Type: Original｜Tag: Inspiration

Karma

It is a very karmic thing to meet your interest in your work.

The love of caves originated in the summer of 2016. I travelled to Ajanta Caves and Ellora Caves in Maharashtra, India to pursue Buddhist art. When I saw the tempera painting of the Lotus Hand Bodhisattva in Cave 1 at Ajanta, I was saddened. This peaceful art had fallen into such a state of disrepair. In the gloom, humidity mixed with the strong smell of bat urine. Since then, I have always thought about what I could do for cave art in my future travels.

Opportunity always knocks. Four years later, the department decided to go to Dunhuang for a reunion. It was the first time I went to Mogao Grottoes, carrying President Zhao Shengliang's "A Brief History of Dunhuang Cave Art" on my back.

In the caves, the lecturer's explanation was awe-inspiring. There were even listeners who took out their mobile phones and took careful notes. Everyone kept a whispered silence, so quiet that they could feel the nostrils of others. The narrator also mentioned that the caves have temperature and humidity monitoring to keep the tourists visiting within a controlled range. The influx of tourists brings carbon dioxide and water vapour, which can affect the murals. The group was overwhelmed as if a single breath would make the murals even more fragile. Each visit to a cave is like a baptism, and the power of silence, serenity, and intimidation rushes through the skin from deep within. I believe this is a kind of cultural confidence brought about by ease.

That trip to the Mogao Caves left us a strong shock, and cultural identity. Dunhuang's longstanding and brilliant culture should be seen by more people.

Of course, the trip to the Mogao Caves also laid the groundwork for the subsequent collaboration with the Dunhuang Research Institute on ‘Yunyu Dunhuang’. Our MPR colleague sent CDC an offer to work with the Dunhuang Academy. On that day, I opened our wisdom brocade, and it said, studying what you love is the best investment you can make. It was as if the ‘Lotus Hand Bodhisattva’ from Ajanta Cave four years ago had reappeared in front of us. I never dreamed that one day I would be involved in cave art.

How did it come?

Once we were back in Shenzhen, we pulled together a Dunhuang tour group to sort out the user journey of visiting the Mogao Caves. We put ourselves in the shoes of the tourists and the audience to find out the pain points of the experience. For example:

Before visiting, we didn't have a channel to focus on the knowledge, or the literature was too advanced. Not every tourist will look for homework in advance, peak season visits to the Mogao Caves have made it hard to buy a ticket, can there exist a way to inspire the tourists to understand the Mogao Caves on their own once they have got the tickets?

During the visit, we have no way to quickly remember the visited cave, and can not be photographed, tourists always want to take something. After a day, the visited caves have become a string of meaningless numbers. There is no strong memory, and how can inspire tourists to participate in the preservation of the caves?

After visiting, tourists will always sigh when they encounter the beauty of the world. Usually, this aha moment is valid for twenty-four hours. Is there a way to extend this feeling? From twenty-four hours to any time. Perhaps a delightful night inspired the urge to go to Dunhuang, or a memory triggered the motivation to get involved in cave conservation?

With these questions, we sorted out the concept of product design. The first presentation of the product concept was made when the Dean of Dunhuang Academy Zhao Shengliang visited the company. That was the first time we met Professor Zhao, an amiable scholar. (Fanboy has a photo of Professor Zhao! Squeal!)

Not long after that, we travelled to Dunhuang again. This time it wasn't a team building, but a field research to the Dunhuang Academy to interview the most solid guardians of the Mogao Caves. At Dunhuang, we stayed for a fortnight. During the two weeks, worked with MPR colleagues, I interviewed all the organisations in the institute. We went up and down the mountains every day, doing interviews to understand the functions and status of each department and what their demands were. At that moment, I realised the importance of stakeholders, a concept that is often mentioned in service design.

During that time, I am especially grateful to the specialists of the Dunhuang Academy for their help and guidance, allowing us to go to the data centre to look for information, to do questionnaire surveys for tourists, to learn about the micro-environment of the caves and the digital collection, and to observe the creation of the rock-colour paintings, et cetera. At that moment, it was as if we were rooted in the same place, we were also rooted in Dunhuang, and one of the watchmen who stood firmly in the desert.

After finishing the half-month field research, I returned to Shenzhen and started to collate the information at hand.

「How to reconcile the conflict between conservation and tourism?」

This question always lingers in the mind. To answer this question, we made a competitive analysis for the direction of preservation, research and promotion. We found that a high-quality big picture is often the first door to open a new world. At the same time, we initiated a pan-Dunhuang design language study. When discussing the visual language of Dunhuang, we tried to describe it from subjective feelings and objective facts, and then extracted the design system and applied it to product design. The whole discussion process was quite discursive.

Based on the Dunhuang Academy's big goal of preservation, research and promotion, as well as the broken experience of tourists before and during the visit, we can provide for the Dunhuang Academy and tourists at this stage:

For the Dunhuang Academy, the construction of the knowledge base, the popularity of preservation, and the attraction of the public enhance the user experience.
For the Dunhuang Academy's collaboration with Tencent, through the best practice to demonstrate creativity and disseminate Dunhuang culture to users.
For the Foundation's collaboration with Tencent, by encouraging users to make personal donations and attracting social funds to the Dunhuang Academy through the Foundation.

We hope that this solution will build an emotional bond between users and the Dunhuang Caves, allowing users to bring the best memories home. What you bring home is not only the souvenirs you bought when you left Dunhuang but also the emotional connection. I've been to this cave, and I've collected this mural in my heart, it's personal stuff. It is also the engagement of users, each of whom creates a unique artistic and cultural sanctuary. Therefore, the product is positioned at:

「Build a user-centred cultural and artistic tour of Dunhuang Caves, helping users to explore, visit and preserve Dunhuang caves online.」

How we do it?

WeChat Mini-Program, which requires the building of a knowledge base, and headwinds come first place. The Dunhuang Academy has a very full range of paper-based documentation and journal articles, but it is inevitably too much for visitors. Visitors need more approachable and accessible materials which are less digitised. It also means that extra content-building is called for here, and more specialists need to be brought in.

So we have a huge headwind, and it will be a long and slow content-building that requires patience. There's much saying around us about overtaking on bends’. Think about Chang Shuhong and Fan Jinshi, who have spent their entire lives in the desert. Even under great pressure, I can still maintain my patience.

We started to conceptualise the positioning of the backend system. What capabilities are needed, and what interfaces are needed for these features? As can be seen from the product architecture, the main task of the backend system is to provide material for the user-explorable content in the WeChat Mini-Program continuously. The material is mainly divided into two categories, one is basic material, and the other is operational material. Based on the material, the long-term goal is to build a content system that integrates content-building, content operation and content effect measurement. At this stage, the first task is to provide basic materials for content-building. At present, all the materials we have are scanned PDF materials. The content structure of the materials varies, in both graphic mixed word type and dictionary type. At the same time, the field is far from each other.

Therefore, the R&D group set up a whole set of content-building processes, including the process from OCR recognition, and transcription to calibration, as well as the process of uploading images and adding labels and descriptions to the images. The content group started uploading and entering the corresponding information.

At the same time, there was also the arduous task of categorising the materials. Faced with the huge and unfamiliar terminologies, we were all stumped and rightly regarded it as reading. We took a first draft, and every once in a while, we went to the Dunhuang Academy to discuss the appropriateness of it with the specialists.

Popularization in public is also a small step forward in heritage preservation. We are trying to tell you about the direct impact of visiting. When tourists come to visit the caves, the relationship starts, and there is an emotional bond -

「You come to my life with touching moments.」

We want to try to convey this power of life - like birth and death - to tourists and even to online users. Tell everyone, that the cave is also alive, cave murals have a lot of diseases, and everyone with Dunhuang Academy and Tencent together come to a common concern, we have to have this awareness.

The attraction of the public is also a very critical part of the whole user experience. By exploring online, we extend the life circle and bring the tour to the user's phone. Meeting the Dunhuang Caves tries to plant a seed in the user's mind, which is planted by the user himself, very personally. One day, our user will go to Dunhuang himself and bring his knowledge of the Dunhuang Caves in pursuit of the devotion and love that moved him in the first place.

We have also put together a 'Dunhuang Digital Donors', which is a communication project that the company and the Dunhuang Academy have worked on in previous years. We believe that there will be many more teams in the future that will work with us to bring Dunhuang culture to more people. With the vision of technology for good, we are calling on the public to participate in the preservation of the Dunhuang Caves with our company.

What are the difficulties?

The biggest headwind in the creative process is how to further lower the threshold so that the public can accept it without difficulties.

「Dunhuang is in the air, and we are standing on the ground.」

We tried many different ways, but the results were not as good as we had hoped. The final was not settled down until three days before the launch. The ‘My Dunhuang Quotes’ you see now is a last-minute proposal. Rush but good. In the last few days, the team almost stayed up all night.

After the launch, we further optimised ‘My Dunhuang Quotes’. In addition to optimising the sharing delivery, we also thought about how to better guide users to explore more. We also prepared an easter egg for the nostalgia.

On top of that, there were many unappreciated moments during the hibernation. The cultural identity that the Dunhuang Caves bring us is what sustains our belief that the beauty of Dunhuang should be seen more often by the world. Thankfully, we got through it with our heads down.

There are also some laughable sufferings. People may not believe it when I tell them. We encountered a flood in Dunhuang, and the research was also suspended due to the rescue, the research directly doubled the time, and we felt the pressure from the company. The fact is, there are no direct flights from Shenzhen to Dunhuang, and hopefully there may be direct flights from Shenzhen to Dunhuang in the future.

A final word on takeaways.

When go deep into this project, my role in the project is no longer a designer, but many roles such as product manager and project management. For example, product manager, I began to understand the features of following the business, so there is a content-building of the whole process. Besides, in project management, I started to care about the cost, so there are batch actions in the backend system.

Facing the headwind brought by different roles, offering me a game. The interchange of multiple roles allowed me to stand in different roles of the team to look at the same problem, and better understand how people inside the team think and solve problems. Behind the mountains, there are people to be found. To discover and realise greater value in a wider space. It is also because of crossing so many roles that I have a more comprehensive understanding of product design and each role of the team involved in product design.

Designing at CDC is a game of love, and designers have enough freedom to realise their ideals and pursue justice in their hearts, even if the road is long. Looking back at the whole process of design, it is a gradual growth.

Just as I love to use Mogao Cave 85 ’The Metaphor of Ceramic Master’ in my showcase. Whether it's product design or Dunhuang caves, love, like ceramics making, is always a gradual process.