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NAOTO FUKASAWA
Plus Minus Zero’s 8-inch LCD TV (2003) – a television in the shape of a cathode-ray tube.
interview by shirley surya images and portrait courtesy of naoto fukasawa design
Some see you as a synthesis of East and West. Are there such categories in your design approach?
How often do we encounter a product that is at once instinctive in its usage, beckoning your touch and pull, and whose elements endear themselves to the user? Not often. But stepping into the ±0 (PLUS MINUS ZERO) Aoyama store in Tokyo, where everyday home appliances like humidifiers and cordless phones designed by Naoto Fukasawa are sparsely displayed, induced just such a response. From designing printers, to helming IDEO’s Tokyo arm and going solo with his own much-coveted product line, Fukasawa has grown from crafting objects to crafting relationships between users and their objects. With everything there is already possible to know about the designer – famous for his MoMA-worthy MUJI CD Player and over 40 award-winning poetry-meets-function designs – in his Phaidon monograph, iSh attempts to peer further into some of our set assumptions on Fukasawa’s relation to Japanese culture, minimalism, and design. So intuitive is his approach to design, it can either liberate or frustrate those who seek to pin down and emulate his steps. But perhaps the ambiguity is a call to a deeper search of our relationships with our subjects and objects; to think simple, in our own way. For all that the grandmaster of product design had shared, amidst plenty of jests despite his stern demeanour and self-admitted reticence, iSh is grateful.
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seeing design as just a design process. While IDEO is a stellar group of design consultants for product development, another group exists in Europe where they really strive to make I’m not really designing from the local culture of Japan. I see things that enhance people’s lives. In IDEO, I did strategic demyself more as collecting many elements of design, like the sign which is more about new ideas. However, I also see the company’s brand identity or a country’s culture, its market other side of traditional design in Europe. I might do both. and technologies. Those different bits make one object. If I’m But I want to create a simple way to make peoples’ lives betdesigning for an Italian company, I use more of the bits from ter. Sometimes the American approach to business is too much their culture, so my product becomes more fitting to their – thinking of many good things, much reasoning and being culture. If I express too much of my own there, that’s totally very rational (laughs). Sometimes it makes the process more wrong, because things should fit more naturally. However, I complicated. Design’s answer should be simpler. grew up in a Japanese culture. So that mentality might have influenced the design elements. One can’t ignore that I’m a Some describe your work as “Japanese minimal design”. Do Japanese designer. you agree? And what is this Japanese-ness?
Yes. But I was not trying to follow that. People just describe. It’s the easiest way, because I’m a Japanese designer (laughs).
If you just feel that a design is good, this doesn’t necessarily mean it is really complete. Like when someone says, “Your de- How about the idea of Japanese minimalism? sign is great,” but it has not taken environmental issues into consideration, we won’t be satisfied. So you can say that it is Japanese minimalism is, as I have said, completeness. The radiabout a sense of completeness. cal shape of a red flower, for example, may not look minimal. If there is a flower here, no one would say that it is minimal. But Any difference if you didn’t leave Japan for IDEO? it is totally minimal because a perfect rose looks like a rose. A flower looks like a perfect flower. Minimal is not just whiteI had quite a unique role at IDEO, more like an independent washed. Minimalism is only the essential. There’s no necessity designer. Sometimes people say I’m a “traditional” designer. to add or mix anything with it, yet it’s quite radical. I hate that word. However that may be right because they are more innovative strategists changing the style, know-how and process of design. But I’m still interested to just design and 103