Intro
Born 1958 Tokyo
Graphic designer, curator, professor at Musashino Art University, and art director at Muji, Kenya Hara has garnered recognition for his design work in identification and communication. After graduating in 1983 with a graduate degree from the university where he now teaches, Hara has lead and participated in a variety of design projects. He has represented Japan in the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics by creating the opening and closing programs and even submitted proposals for Japan’s next summer Olympics in 2020. Beyond a graphic designer, Hara is know as one of Japan’s leading thinkers and philosophers of contemporary design. Many of his philosophies revolve around rethinking the ordinary and abstract concepts. Additionally sensitive to Japan’s past, Hara is leading Japan’s future of design.
“I only have two types of jobs. The first are jobs where I’m commissioned to make work and the second are jobs where I propose an idea to society, where I suggest another way of looking at something.”
Viewing the World from the Tip of Asia
Hara believes that today’s Japan exists because of three components: positioning on the edge of Asia, its special cultural sensitivity, and a stable calming stance facing the world. Tokyo, the tip of Asia, has always been Kenya Hara’s vantage point to view the world. Removed from center of the world, Japan understands other cultures well. Given Japan’s history, this shifting adaptive perspective has allowed Japan to develop a unique identity. Following a lost war and nuclear detonations, Japan tried to Westernize and modernize as quickly as possible.
Kenya Hara was born as the country turned to industrialism and the factory took over. The rapid industrial progress that followed may now be slowing down. In 2012, the Internal Affairs Ministry reported that the number of people working in factories was the lowest it had been in 50 years. Thus, Hara now believes that Japan is ready to undo the industrialism it had create long ago. He explains that rather than focus on production, Japan should focus on value and quality. Resources like sensai (delicateness), chimitsu (meticulousness), teinei (thoroughness or attention to detail) and kanketsu (simplicity) should become Japan’s greatest assets. Hara believes that designers will be at the forefront, visualizing the new futures to come as they disrupt the industrial culture.
Hara embraces Japan’s modest positioning “on the edge of the world” and its past scars. The edge provides a true global perspective. The Eastern-most location of Japan on Eurasia offers Hara a key to the rest of the mega-continent. Culture as far as Rome in its prime has trickled down to where Japan catches everything. Balancing itself on the edge and frontier of the world creates Japan’s unique aesthetics and design.
Redesign
Making the Ordinary Unknown
Exhibition, Tokyo 2000, Takeo Paper Show
Kenya Hara always “re-designs” things. From curating architects to “re-designing” macaroni, to creating fireworks, and coming up with a new ball game, Hara believes the more we think we know about an object, the less we understand it. Hara produced the exhibition “Re-design” in 2000, with the help of 32 creators from various fields such as architecture and advertising. Each participated in “re-designing” an ordinary object. The sole purpose of the exhibition was not to state how objects should be improved nor was it meant to amuse. Rather, each “re-design” offers a stark difference to the conventional object and practice. This difference shows the power of design in shaping our living environment. With this exhibition, Hara hoped to renew feelings towards both ordinary objects and to the essence of design itself.
“Producing something new from scratch is creative, but making the known unknown is also an act of creation. Maybe the latter is more useful in nailing down just what design is.”
Hara chose the pairings of creators and objects. The redesigns vary from cockroach traps that look like little homes, to matches made with real twigs, and a tea bag with a ring on the opposite end that is the same color as a correctly steeped cup of tea.
Shigeru Ban and Toilet Paper
Hara paired architect, Shigeru Ban, with toilet paper. Ban is well know for treating paper, a normally delicate fragile material, with strength, flexibility, and durability. Some of his largest projects include inexpensive buildings with paper frames.
Ban uses a square core instead of a round one, making the wrapped roll also form a square. When the roll is unraveled from the dispenser, it clunks and offers resistance, making unreeling more difficult than the conventional roll, which reduces consumption instead. The square roll further optimize storage, where the rolls fit more tightly together. Ban doesn’t suggest all rolls should be square but shows how even the slightest altercations between a square and a circle can create vastly different objects.
Haptic
Awakening the Senses.
Exhibition, Tokyo 2004, Takeo Paper Show
Hara produced the Haptic exhibition in 2004. The term “Haptic” relates to the sense of touch, and Hara uses this approach as a framework to think about how to perceive things with ones body and not just their eyes. Thus in essence, this project is about sensing objects rather than making or creating objects. It is important to note that Kenya Hara thinks of humans as a bundle of senses — an active network of sensory organs with which humans experience the world. In this context, Hara describes creativity as the awakening of human senses.
While dealing with shape, color, material, and texture is one of the more important aspects of design, there is one more: it’s not the question of how to create, but how to make someone sense something. We might call this creative awakening of the human sensors “the design of the senses.””
In this exhibition, Hara again asked creators to design objects driven by “haptic” elements rather than their form or color. Sketching was not allowed; participants had to start the project by thinking about how an object could awake the senses. This resulted in hanging lanterns made of hair, coasters that look like petri dishes, and gel remotes that lose rigidity when turned off.
Naoto Fukasawa: Juice Skin
Product Designer Naoto Fukasawa revitalized the simple handheld juice box. Fukasawa used a banana skin, to package the banana juice. Not only the color of the box, but the folds in the packaging, and the stem flap all replicate the look and feel of a banana. These elements create an entirely new visceral reaction to an otherwise ordinary task. Fukasawa also did the same with akiwi and strawberry flavor.
[Senseware]
Medium That Intrigues Man
The information in our brains can be compared to architecture, where a structure built by our accumulated passed sensory perceptions. Our senses are the building blocks of our minds. Thus, the mind can exist anywhere we can sense across our body. With this view, we no longer have a single access point through our physical brain to reach our minds; our brains exists everywhere in our body.
The term “Senseware” refers to things that inspire our sensory perceptions. The first examples of these are stone tools from 400,000 years ago. The weight, feel, and texture of these objects creats a visceral reaction, making it clear why our ancestors used them so long ago.
White
Kenya Hara has many perspectives on color. Although technology provides an abundance and range of colors for designers to use, Hara feels less inspired by the “easygoing” use of color. Nonetheless, he acknowledges that color is important. It gives life to what would otherwise be a desolate world. Hara only uses color when absolutely necessary and will minimizes the number of colors in each project. Rather than utilize color, Hara prefers white; it is both an amalgamation of all colors and a void of color, but represents opportunity and diversity.
Rather than just be seen as a color, white should also be seen as a design concept. Simply searching for white in not feasible because there is no white, it only exists in our perceptions. So how can one feel white? One must continually try to find the next whitest step in order to develop a consciousness of white. Understanding concepts such as “tranquility,” “silence,” and “emptiness” develops a clear understanding of white.
“White is easily soiled and is hard to keep clean. White impresses us as more beautiful still thanks to our feelings of empathy towards anything transient.”
White is unique because it is empty of color, making it appropriate to describe abstract concepts like zero, absence, or non-existence. It also is the original form of life and escapes from the chaotic mix of all colors that mix and tumble into grey.
“I see the original form of my own work as the imaging of white rising to majestic stature from chaotic gray.”
Muji
no-brand quality goods
In 2001, MUJI’s first creative director, Ikko Tanaka, invited Hara to offer the position of art director and join the board at the company. Hara, initially caught off guard by the invitation, became excited to be among the next generation leading the company and by the possibility of expanding MUJI’s vision around the globe. Hara requested that MUJI product designer, Naoto Fakusawa, join the board as well. When the three met for the first time drinking tea in Tanaka’s office, they discussed their excitement for the company’s future. Tanaka exclaimed how the work was so exciting that he couldn’t sleep at night. It was only three days later, after passing the company along to the next generation, that Ikko Tanaka unexpectedly died.
Kenya Hara has been on MUJI’s advisory board and has served as its art director since 2002. Since taking over the as company’s art direction, Hara has realized the MUJI vision on a global scale. From the vantage point on the edge of the world, the company pursues an aesthetic infinitely appeasing to humans without extravagance, but rather offering pure simplicity.
It was back in 1980 that Tanaka and Seiji Tsutsumi, a leader in distribution, birthed the company, originally creating straightforward inexpensive products. The simplification of the production process became key to MUJI’s identity. MUJI’s unbleached paper in its packaging and labeling is one example of this simplification process. Over time, the company drifted from competing as a low cost option when low cost production moved overseas. Rather than be “cheap,” MUJI set its direction on achieving quality worthy of reaching the farthest points on the earth. As a result, Hara is responsible for bringing the vision of a global MUJI forward.
With any of MUJI’s 7,000 products, one should be able to gleam a new consciousness to lifestyle. MUJI strives to be modest in exciting an appetite in its customers and sees itself opposing brands that excite an “I must have this response.” Hara believes that the world is getting tired of chasing desire and is ready for a humble “this will do” mentality. He believes that we should value acceptance, moderation, concession, and detached reason. Rather than become an idiosyncratic or ordinary, MUJI uses simplicity to derive value. MUJI strives to point out the basics, the universality, and the value of everyday life.
Hara proposed the word emptiness for MUJI’s advertising campaign in 2003. Thinking of advertising as a mutual exchange, Hara believes that the viewer should supply something to the collective vision. Effective communication is rarely one sided. The provided emptiness offers much room for broad interpretation. For example, the simple circle on the Japanese flag can derive many different interpretations from the sun, the ocean, blood, spirit, or even food. People admire MUJI for many reasons, for its simplicity, aesthetic, its price, its sustainability. This builds a brand and a name that is deep and significant.
The “Horizon” advertisement campaign embodied this emptiness with photographs of vast empty landscapes with the MUJI logo placed on the horizon. While representing nothing, it can also accommodate anything, leading to a world of possibilities. Photographer Tamotsu Fujii captures human, earth, and sky in one photograph. Using the horizon to split the poster in two, Fujii creates an expansive empty space, getting at the essence of what an object is and depicting MUJI’s vision for a future of possibility.
Hara believes that the perspective of the whole of time, past, present, and future, should be taken into account. While the future is before our feet, the accumulated vastness of the past remains available to us.
