Project Overview:
We combined traditional tea culture with new media technology and designed the Innovative Tea Lab in the hometown of Tieguanyin. Here, we tried to merge entertainment with knowledge and show different possibilities to have fun with tea. While designing each sections’ layout of the space, we focused on the multiple interactive experiences, so that visitors could immerse themselves into this space of rich tea culture and multi-dimensional experiences.
Highlights
The pronunciation of “tea” firstly originated from the southern Min language “te”. Tea drinking is not only a local culture in Southern Min area, but also a daily routine in local people’s life. Most local families have a tea room at home for relaxing and friends-meeting. Like wine, coffee and other popular beverages, tea also has its contemporary side. "Tea" can be expressed in a creative interactive way to accompany people for a long time.
Tea culture has a long history in China. However, when facing the young consumer group, how to renew the traditional culture, let more people understand and get interested in tea culture? We aimed to present tea-drinking tradition while taking the cultural tourism and interactive technology into consideration. Visitors could experience several innovative ways to “have fun” with tea.
We try to create an innovative, cultural tourism destination with personal experience as the core. Through the intriguing interactive technology, we are able to convey local culture to the visitors, and revive the traditional commercial space.
For example, In the tea workshop, we set up a “Qi Cha” interactive installation to show the tea culture in a fun way. We have extracted the most representative knowledge and gameplay from the long-standing tea culture, creating an innovative experimental field, combining mechanical dynamics and digital lighting with artistic interpretation. The installation will display different ways of making tea, and show you the most suitable tea for the current season. Through the inspiring integration of traditional tea culture and contemporary mechanical aesthetics, we hope to create a unique environment where you can harvest happiness and knowledge as well as appreciate the aesthetics of tea.
In the fifth interactive unit "Tea Tasting", we have built a small tea room for you, bringing you a sensory immersive experience, allowing you to temporarily escape from the busy life in the city, making and drinking tea to enjoy inner peace during the process.
The visitor will pass through the seven sections including "tea hall - tea making - tea frying - tea smelling - tea picking - tea workshop - tea fun" and complete the travel of tea through "seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting". Despite the design of the spatial division and the traffic flow, we attach importance to the overall experience as well as the specific, micro interactive experience. The tea space carries the visual and tastes of tea, and appears to be the place where the visitors could be immersed into the rich tea culture. The design of traditional tea space is often monotonous and "predictable", yet we combine the knowledge of tea culture with interest and innovation, and make the natural scene reappear. Therefore, the traditional commercial space is endowed with more possibilities.
Business Value or Social Value
Combining technology and tradition together, an amusement park of the traditional tea culture was created; multi-dimensional sensory interaction was used to establish an “innovation field” to change the traditional experience of tea culture; new upgrade of the traditional commercial space was also integrated into the "classroom" popularizing tea culture. The Innovative Tea Lab has also won the Merit Award in ADC 101st Annual Awards.
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