Design
If we consider the stone axe to be humanity’s first tool, then the very condition that makes us human can be called ‘design’. What matters is not only the act of making things, but the will to understand and shape our environment through them. To take root in a place requires a process of mutual adaptation. This is the primal landscape of design.
Civilization and Culture
Civilization transcends culture, while culture remains bound to place. The modern era has been characterized by the aspiration to be civilized and design is no exception. The very tools that civilization in recent decades has given us – the internet and social media – have, however, made evident a simple truth: the world is still a collection of countless distinct cultures. We now live in an age where we confront culture through civilization. What then, is modern design within culture? In spaces and bodies shaped by climate and landscape, what exactly is the modernity that resides there?
Returning to the Unformed
Makers and users and their daily lives: within these interactions, countless ideas are filtered and crystallized into kata (patterns) and katachi (forms). In Japan, boundaries blur. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, in In Praise of Shadows (1933), recalls eating yōkan (sweet bean jelly) in a darkened room. Through the experience of tasting the yōkan in the darkness, one too dissolves into that time and place. To return, once more, to what was once divided is to return to the unformed, an ambient state of being.
The objects designed by hyakkō – a myriad of makers – are tools of many kinds. Perhaps they represent the process by which we, through them, adapt to our environment.
中村将大 Nakamura Masahiro
Design/Design Education, Assistant Professor, Teikyo Heisei University