Human/Object Relations: Naoto Fukasawa

Images courtesy of Naoto Fukasawa

Naoto Fukasawa and Kenya Hara are two of the most influential designers working today, and when we tried to bring them together, the result was a typhoon. A literal typhoon, of the train-stranding variety.

We here at Theme were as excited by the recent release of Hara’s Designing Design as we were with Fukasawa’s eponymous monograph, released earlier this year. Fukasawa is an extremely prolific product designer whose Plus Minus Zero brand produces some of the most elegant industrial design to come out of Japan; graphic designer Hara is head of the Nippon Design Centre and well-known for his interest in, and book/exhibition focusing on, haptics and the sense of touch.

Both designers have ties to “No Brand” product manufacturer MUJI—Fukasawa designed their iconic wall-mounted CD player, and both Hara and Fukasawa serve on the board of advisors—and whenwe found out the two men knew each other, we asked Hara, whom we featured in our fall 2005 issue, to interview Fukasawa for Theme. Both men graciously agreed to free up some time in their busy schedule, and though the aforementioned typhoon left Fukasawa temporarily stranded outside of Tokyo at the appointed time, they were able to meet some hours later.

As the typhoon waned, the interview, our translator tells us, went fantastically. Until she accidentally erased the recording of it. An extremely patient Hara and Fukasawa helped her reconstruct the interview, and we are happy to bring you, at long last, a conversation between two design greats that survived disasters both natural and digital.

Kenya Hara: Let’s start at the beginning. Did you know from childhood that you would end up going into design?
Naoto Fukasawa: I always enjoyed drawing, but my father owned an electric appliance company and I’d thought I would someday inherit the family business, so I went to an industrial high school. By graduation time, I had gotten my father’s permission to go to college before taking over the business. While I was considering what to major in, I came across an article about what industrial designers do. The article defined the profession as “people who make others happy through industrial products.” When I read that, I said “That’s it!” I knew that’s what I wanted to become. I think that was the moment that really changed the course of my life.

Also, we lived right above my father’s office, and as a young boy I was always playing with the various tools and gadgets lying around. One day I spotted a pack of insulating tape and found it simply beautiful. There was something substantial and powerful about the way the tape was tightly rolled into a mass, and once I unrolled the tape I simply could not restore its original shape, no matter how neatly I tried to roll it back on. Now that I look back, I guess that was when I began to see beauty in a solid that has no distinct separation between the interior and exterior elements.

It’s a bit unexpected, yet very much like you to be inspired by a roll of tape and not something like, say, a Noguchi sculpture or a Matisse painting.
I was always familiarized with and naturally attracted to industrial products like that.

I see. And then you moved to Tokyo to attend the product design program at Tama Art University?
I was actually accepted to both the product design and graphic design programs, but I chose product design only because there were less people taking it.

I think design education in Japan at that time was largely influenced by Western design culture. I attended Musashino Art University’s Science of Design department, where the professors were very into the theoretical side of art and design, having been influenced by the Hochschule fur gestaltung ulm in Germany. Did you find anything similar?
Back then, some of the Tama professors had just come back from studying at the Art Center College of Design in the US, and so they were deeply encouraging us students to produce more and more physical works, almost like vocational training. We were just moving our hands all day without thinking, making things one after the other.

When did you abandon the idea of taking on your father’s business?
Soon after entering university. My father said, “Do as you wish,” but later on I heard from my mother that he was grumbling about my decision.

After university you worked at the Seiko Epson Corporation for years, then quit in your mid-thirties and decided to try life overseas. I’ve heard you did physical labor for a while before your move.
I knew it would take a lot of money to settle down abroad, so while I was waiting for my visa, I sought something short-term but well-paying. That job was hard work—every day I loaded a truck with four tons of industrial waste, mostly construction materials—but I did learn many interesting things. Until then I had no idea that such a huge amount of garbage was being discharged every day. I was thinking of going to perhaps Italy or Germany, but in the end I went to the US to work for ID TWO (the company that later became IDEO) because the company was quite well-known for their product design and development . It really didn’t make a difference to me where I lived, as long as I could work internationally. My goal was not to work in a certain country. It’s not like you always know exactly where you want to go in the end—you just find out gradually, as you move forward little by little.

How were your co-workers at ID TWO?
Very creative and innovative. They were experts from various fields of work, not just product design—human factors, mechanical engineering, electric engineering, interactive design. But we always worked on projects in teams, which I wasn’t so keen on. I preferred to work solo. Then after about a year, I was amazed to see I had received design awards for every single product I designed, and more and more I was allowed to work individually. So I became a sort of individual entity while still maintaining friendly terms with my co-workers.

You introduced the idea of individual design philosophy presentations at one of IDEO’s study sessions. Can you elaborate?
Most designers at IDEO were not American, and everyone had different cultural backgrounds and design philosophies. So I suggested that each person speak about his or her ideologies of design, and they said, “You first.” So I started thinking, what is it that serves as the principle or the base of my ideas when I’m working on designs? The word that came to my mind was hari (a traditional Japanese concept of “tension.”) So I gave a presentation on the concept of hari in forms and designs. The presentation had an impact and generated quite some buzz, which eventually spread outside the company and through the Bay Area, and so I gave a lecture on the subject at Stanford University, wrote about it in a magazine, and published a book on it.

After spending seven and a half years at IDEO, what made you come back to Japan?
Because I thought I would become an American if I stayed much longer. IDEO was undoubtedly at the top of the field of product design, and if I’d continued working there I would have probably achieved conventional American design success, but I learned that there was a group of people who had surpassed all that and didn’t care about things like getting design awards and getting into magazines and such. I wanted to reach that level very badly but just didn’t know just how. I was in my late 30s and thinking, “Isn’t there something else I should be doing?” I came to the realization I couldn’t stay there any longer, and I decided to move back to Japan.

And established your own design office here (Naoto Fukasawa Design). What did you go through before setting that up?
When I first came back to Japan, I established IDEO’s Japanese branch as the branch manager. But it never felt right to me, being called “Mr. Fukasawa of IDEO” all the time. I was always being mentioned in the same breath as IDEO.

Yes, Japanese society is reluctant to accept the power of individuals.

Theme magazine has asked us how we know each other. I remember first learning about you when a magazine asked me to give a lecture right after yours. In preparation, I read their article on you. In other articles I’d read, designers always talked about new materials and marketing and things like that, but you were different, talking about the unconsciousness of human beings. What you were saying was so totally different from what any other designer was saying, I remember being surprised and saying to myself, “Is this guy really Japanese? Where did he come from?” At the lecture, I remember you were talking about design with an expression on your face as if doing design was the happiest thing on earth. And I saw that you were trying to touch at the same thing that I was trying to touch. So I decided to ask you to participate in my Re:design project, and was able to meet you in person for the first time. Anyhow, you used a language that was very different from all the other designers, and your presence, to me, was very fresh.
That was when I was still at IDEO. Since then, you and I have worked on various projects together, including designs for MUJI.

There are two milestones, I think, in your designs from that period. One is the MUJI CD player, and the other is the Epson printer with the trash bin. Can you talk about that piece?
I wanted to come from a totally new perspective, and I designed it so the printer stands within the trash bin. Most of what is printed becomes trash anyways, so why not? I completely abandoned all meaningless forms, such as making the printer round or square, etc. I realized there was no need to create new forms; all I had to do was design the relationship between a human, an object, and what is around the two. That realization gave me a big relief.

For example, if a client asked me “Please design a chair” while sitting in a good chair, I might go so far as to say, “Why? You’re already sitting in a nice one!” That’s almost it. People think that design is about making new things, creating new stimulations. But what about the good relationships that already exist? Why abandon all that and make things all over again? If there is already a relationship with a chair that is 95 percent good, then all that has to be done is to adjust the remaining 5 percent to suit the current needs. The client might persist and say “No, no, I want you to design it, Mr. Fukasawa.” But what I’m trying to say is that the important thing is how much design you can do with the remaining 5 percent of what has been 95 percent completed, how you can make the best out of the design that has already been developed and improved, and make your design along with what’s already there, instead of just throwing everything out and starting from scratch. Of course, to design that 5 percent is not as easy as it sounds because you have to further improve what’s already a great design.

I completely agree. I used to think that being creative means to start from zero and build up something new, but recently I’ve begun to feel that what designers do is kind of like a clean-up. For example, the reason why Japanese Zen temples are so beautiful is not so much because of the architecture or the gardens themselves but because the temples are cleaned up well. Cleaning up is to take good care of the borderline between the natural and the artificial, and that process, if continued for a long time, brings forth something like a faint shoreline between what’s natural and what’s man-made. That littoral strand is really where the essence of beauty lies in Japanese gardens and Zen temples. I think that is similar to what we do.

Here’s another example. When you typeset a sentence, you don’t need an unusual font. All you need is a simple font, with each and every letter carefully considered, and that is enough to give the typography its power. It is just as how each and every leaf on a tree grows in consciousness of the sunlight and also how each and every hair on an animal’s skin grows according to its own will. A fine coat of fur on a live animal is so beautiful, but once the animal is killed and stuffed, the beauty is gone.
What do you think about theme of this issue, which is “I Want”?
“I Want?” That is the worst theme ever (laughs). You shouldn’t want. Well, maybe this is a good theme, in a paradoxical sense. Have you seen that bestseller book in the stores now? I think it was called Don’t Desire, or something like that. [Motomenai, (Don’t Desire) written by Shouzou Kashima, published by Shougakukan, 2007. Japanese only. –Ed.] The book is about how humans can become happy by not wanting. Humans should not want. When you want, you become impatient and anxious. On the other hand, if you stop wanting, then “giving up” gives a sense of stability. A part of wanting is to have the desire to become something that you really are not. The same goes for jealousy. I think there is a close relationship between accepting yourself as the person that you are and not wanting more than what you really do need. That completes a harmony and creates a stable environment. So it is best to not want, especially about material things. Having very few material things is actually a very rich way of living, I think. And it feels good, too. It feels closer to nature.

Hmm. But wanting also means eagerness, and it would seem rather difficult to eliminate that. Speaking for myself, let me tell you, lately I’ve had little or no desire to shop for things. I went to a big mall and looked at everything from the top floor to the bottom, but there wasn’t a single thing that I wanted.
I think Japanese people tend to be satisfied with whatever is average. It’s like, “Don’t want more than others! Cheers for the salary men! Ordinary is the best!” I’ll bet if you give a huge amount of money to an ordinary Japanese person, that person would have no idea what to buy. I think money is what corrupts a person’s quality of living. The lack of money will allow you to see what really suits you.

Yes, and on the other hand, I’ve been seeing more of what is old that has passed through a long time. I feel a deep reverence for things like 400-year-old architecture covered with moss. That is the kind of thing that I want. Funny, I now understand the psychology of people who buy antiques! After all, we humans only live for roughly 80 years, so if we begin to see the world in view of the time that we have lived already and the time that we have left ahead of us, the quality of the things we want will probably change.
Japanese people cherish the whole process of how an object is gradually formed and then is turned back into decay, probably more so than the actual object itself. In nature, the Japanese are not really the kind of people to want so many things. With an object, what is more important than the design itself is where and how in everyday life it was used. Even things like beauty and art were sought in ordinary and everyday objects, not something decorative and so special. People nowadays are forgetting the fact that the beauty within lies deep within simplicity.

Let me ask you a question from our list here. What is the most perfect design that you have ever come across?
There is no such thing. If a perfect design ever does exist, everything about me­­—even my existence itself—is repudiated. Perfection is never going to happen.

Interesting. What we do as designers, I think, can be described as an “education of desire.” What I mean is, for example, once you learn about the products designed by Naoto Fukasawa, the quality of your desire and your perception of it will gradually change. I think this power is very significant and influential. Next question. What would you like to design next?
Nothing in particular. I mean, that question itself is categorizing the object of design, isn’t it? It’s like going to a little boy and asking, “Do you want to design a car?” or “Do you like home electronics?” If someone asked me to design something, I would only design it if it was something that other people would say, “You’re really going to design that?!?” I’m not interested in designing something that is design-ey. Or maybe I’m just not interested in doing design-ey design. I like something that feels like maybe it was designed, maybe not, but just makes me say, “Hey, that’s nice!” Lately I’ve been designing things like the runners on the ceiling and the wooden pieces that fit in to connect the wall and the floor. When those small things are designed nicely, the whole space becomes really beautiful. I’m also working on designing soaps and Japanese paper. I want to design the unnoticeable.