The KUSO Design

• Main Authors: Chih-cheng, Chang, 張志成
• Other Authors: 劉維公
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/54657658315956387925

碩士 === 實踐大學 === 產品與建築設計研究所 === 97 === The original word “kuso (くそ)” actually means hateful and excrement in Japanese. The Japanese usually use the word to describe something of negative significance. Although “kuso” is a Japanese word, Taiwanese redefine its meaning and use “kuso” to describe something is a parody and funny since it crossed the ocean to Taiwan through the internet. The word and its meaning were disseminated by the ACG internet community in Taiwan. At the early stage, kuso subculture was only popular in the internet, becoming a kind of internet trend; eventually kuso subculture was derived to form a kind of internet subculture unique to Taiwan. Due to media exposure, kuso subculture was extensively disseminated from the virtual internet world into the real world. In the early stage, the KUSO internet community emphasized on “parodic creativity”, perhaps we may say that “creativity” constitutes the kuso culture but to the populace it is disordered, not having significance, rules and inner contents. Actually, KUSO is a kind of subculture developed by the young generation who integrate large amounts of cultural information from all sources, as a reaction to the mainstream culture. They substantially use deconstruction, misappropriation and collage, to generate a setting that is closely related to the internet, as well as Taiwan's social culture. In this study, we discover some cases and characteristics of kuso subculture which prove that kuso can provide aspects and subjects for design thinking and creativity. It also proves that subculture is an important factor influencing contemporary design innovation. Although kuso subculture used the internet as its main development platform, following the internet’s growing impact on the real world, kuso subculture continues to infiltrate into the developing contents of the mainstream culture. The study found that the style of such a sub-culture is popularly accepted and even studied by the public. Looking from the development of Dadaism, KUSO sub-culture reflects trends of the times and a new generation of thinking; it also implies a consumer demand that is worthy of attention and investigation by the design industry.