Design - Looking at how how things work, not just what they look like

From Design

Looking at how how things work, not just what they look like

House Vision 2

On one of the hottest days in August this year, I attended the second HOUSE VISION exhibition in Tokyo, three years after the inaugural event. Read more

A few weeks ago I attended a letterpress workshop at Tsukiji Katsuji (築地活字) print shop in Yokohama. Founded in 1919, the shop specialises in letterpress printing, a mechanical process which went largely out-of-date in the 1980s due to the rise of computers, but has recently experienced a resurgence as an artisan handcraft. Read more

Demystifying Wabi-sabi

Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
It is a beauty of things modest and humble.
It is a beauty of thing unconventional.

While sitting beneath the cherry blossoms at a typical Hanami (“flower viewing”) party in Japan it’s easy to forget that behind the alcohol-fueled revelry you’re actually taking place in a very particular form of appreciation centred on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.

Aesthetic ideals are central to Japan’s cultural identity and the Japanese language has all sorts of fancy words for describing our feelings towards how we perceive the world but underlying them all is the notion of wabi-sabi (侘寂). Read more

Copycat Olympics

Since it’s unveiling in July, the logo for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and its designer Kenjiro Sano, have been mired in controversy amid accusations of plagiarism and a decidedly tepid reaction from the public. Read more

MUJI Appliances by Naoto Fukasawa

Anyone who knows Japanese retailer MUJI (無印良品) in Europe or America is probably familiar with their “no brand” stationery, but in Japan their product range is far bigger with clothing, furniture, food & drink, kitchen ware, cosmetics, bicycles, plants, consumer electronics and even houses. Read more

Inbetween The Lines

Since beginning a full-time job in Tokyo I’ve been taking the train to work, and everyday it leaves me with the weirdest feeling of having just passed through the bowels of some otherworldly monster. Read more

Neon Hong Kong

As long-term readers will know I have a bit of an obsession about the neon signage which gives many cities in Asia their unique and seductive streetscapes. The epitome of this has to be Hong Kong where the dense and chaotic texture of its neon have brought the city to life at night since the 1950s. Read more

Everyday Usability in Japan (Part 3)

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series we looked at some of the intriguing aspects of the way people’s everyday lives are affected by design in Japan. Whether the result of a lone designer with a singular focus or a meddling committee with a medley of requirements it’s fascinating to see how other countries have approached the same challenges. Read more

Chinese Characters for the 99%

Learning to read and write Chinese characters known as hanzi in Chinese, and kanji in Japanese, has to be one of the hardest things a non-native adult can do. The are around 80,000 of them in total and functional literacy requires remembering approximately 3,000. Read more

Everyday Usability in Japan (Part 2)

Last month I looked at some intriguing cases of the way common items in Japan have been designed slightly differently from other countries and since then I’ve been looking around for more examples of the same. Read more