Naoto Fukasawa: Common Sense
continued
Really? Let's see, I ask for a convincing example. Naoto returns to battle with his pen and draws a chair that resembles Spanish Baroque:
"This is a chair that I have just designed for the Japanese company Maruni, so really decorative! This company has an incredible technology to make highly complex shapes, so I said, well, I am going to use your techniques, but I am going to make an even better product. I did not take any details off the decoration, but preserved them in a minimal way. It has all been a challenge."
Another characteristic of Plus Minus Zero’ products is that the corners are rounded: "It is the radius of curvature that is created through the use of things through the years: It is 2.5 mm, a natural radio, non decorative, which favours touch. When someone makes a large radius, say 10 mm, then it becomes decoration."
Some kind of silent, subtle comedy mood, slips in the guise of these quiet-looking, everyday life gadgets that Fukasawa designs. The CD Player for Muji, which is the first piece for which he was known in Europe, is a small device that hangs on the wall and turns on by pulling the cable hanging from it, which is also the cable that feeds its energy; it is a reminder of old kitchen fans which also worked in the same way:
"I like complicity with consumers, the fact that my products sometimes help them understand themselves better; the moment when you use one thing and you realize that you needed it before you knew it existed. For example, the "lamp with a tray": every day you get home and repeat the same actions, you take off your watch and leave it with the keys in the same old spot, then you smile because you realize that the designer knows your own customs better than you do... I love that moment when people smile, but it is something that must be controlled so that it does not become a bad joke."
But how can we not smile at a towel that follows the lines of the tiles on the wall, a telephone mobile that has the asymmetrical angular shape of a freshly peeled potato, an armchair that looks like a giant pebble or a LCD TV that takes the shape of one that functions with a cathode ray tube?
Fukasawa is now collaborating closely, as one of the directors, with the new 21-21 Design Sight Foundation created by Issey Miyake:
"If 20-20 were to be the way to describe perfect vision, 21-21 is a play on words that means looking beyond today and into the future. The Foundation is kind of a laboratory of ideas, a design-tank with the intention of improving society through it. Issey had been thinking about this for a long time, as a responsible person, and it is finally here."
Time is running out and I must go. I gather my things and Naoto tears off the paper in which he has been drawing nervously all the time: "Take them, …for you, just in case ...". We both smile.
Naoto Fukasawa Toaster for plusminuszero
