Moxie Design designed the XMS Media Gallery in Taipei, Taiwan.

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Space
This is a special work mode of a design team. Every day, the team constructs dialogues, communicates, interacts, and compromises with one another. Such a work mode has become a starting point of a challenge to design an innovative living space using mixed media.

The base is an old four-story apartment in the city center (next to the Huashan 1914 Creative Park), which is facing the fate of being torn down and rebuilt. Amidst the anticipation of city renewal, the façade of a series of adjoining “shop houses” conveys the desolation of fading glory. A group of designers pursuing innovation, created a fantastic view, filled with a sharp contrast. To a façade expecting a facelift, the image of an ugly duckling inevitably comes into mind. Thus, the designers of Moxie as a parody use fence nets of a kind seen in construction projects or greenhouses.   However these soft and permeable nets bend and flex along the currents of wind and impacts of rain and with versatility actually present varied “postures” in a humble fashion. The irregular arrangement of the fence nets partition the monotone windows that mark the horizontal dimension, and the flickering lights of our hard-working partners twinkle in the night, echoing the challenges of metropolitan life. Our design team works like dedicated farmers in the greenhouse nurturing the organic forces of life.

Dialogues / Conference Room
The recycled cypress log used to make the conference table was originally the beam of a dismantled structure; with notches of the traditional tenon joints still preserved on the table top. The designer presents the wisdom of traditional architecture and the virtue of thankfulness directly on the table top, which humorously integrates a versatile user interface with a multi-point touch screen. This hi-tech looking gadget symbolizes a dialogue box for free expression.

Communication / The Work Area
Cross-field or cross-specialization is a subject matter in fashion, but what most people do not understand is how designers from different professional backgrounds and different specializations in different media conceive and creative ideas with the same goal. This takes “communication” beyond verbal description into a world of liberated expression. The concept of “T-shaped” talent points out that quality human resources may become the driving force in the process of innovative development. Moreover, a versatile support environment for the design process may represent an interface for interlaying participation and cooperative design works in a “T-shaped” structure; which may create more opportunities for in-depth observation and concept emergence.

Interactivity / The Research Lab
“A lab in the woods” is an idea that pops into this space. It would be difficult for a group of information technology specialists originally working in a science park to imagine what it’s like to do their research in such a space. Similarly, the ambiguous partitions of the spaces in this area come from the wooden pillars of the old structure. The boundaries’ ambiguity implies unrestrained interactivity since their existence, as perceived by the users, has been constructed under a framework free from restriction and suppression. In this space, the designers are liberated to explore the many possibilities in the different containers of diversified cultures. And the devices installed on the irregular beams create organic interactivities in the “woods”, making the sun-drenched terrace inside of the work area not just a rest space but a unique space for unrestrained breathing.

Fusion and Presentation / The Coffee Corner
The “non-working” space is very important to creative workers; this space means the rest area. If a rest space is arranged to give the workers a moment of solitude, this space would be constructed for different forms of dialogues and fusion both internally and externally. Such fusion also presents the achievements of a team’s work both internally and externally. There is a media gallery located on the ground floor of the office, confronting the curious eyes passing through the building. Layered, recycled wood blocks are piled steadfastly in an upward motion, which attempt to interact with one another by posing in different flairs. It is a space that presents to the workers different meanings of “rest” and inspires ingenious ideas.

Visit the Moxie Design website – here.

Photography by Marc Gerritsen

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