Designs on the Future: Exhibits focus on past, present and future of commercial design
Written by Writer on Friday, October 24th, 2008
Designs on the Future: Exhibits focus on past, present and future of commercial design
Cristoph Mark / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
Tokyo, in many ways, is a city that looks to the future, with its internationally renowned products, a burgeoning environmental movement and even its bid to host the 2016 Olympics. Over the next few weeks, it also will be the center of the design world, with a handful of events showcasing the best in graphic and industrial design–both foreign and domestic–where it has been and where it is going.
The epicenter of this phenomenon is Roppongi, specifically Tokyo Midtown, which will be hosting Tokyo Design Tide, the second annual Design Touch (focusing on Japanese designers) and, at 21 21 Design Sight, Second Nature, an exhibit of organically influenced artworks by eight international designers, including furniture and materials designer Tokujin Yoshioka, who also is the curator.
The centerpiece of the exhibit is Yoshioka’s installation, which includes the VENUS–Natural Crystal Chair, whose polyester innards were designed by Yoshioka and completed by naturally formed crystals guided by Yoshioka. Though functional as furniture, the designer says the project was more about working with nature to create something than to work with crystals in particular.
The idea behind the piece, as well as the work by London-based Ross Lovegrove [see inset story], a series of three-dimensional renderings of a bone’s cellular structure, offer a glimpse into the future of science and commercial design, a field that already is beginning to employ such techniques, according to Yoshioka.
Lovegrove told The Daily Yomiuri that he wanted to make the trek to the Ginza Graphic Gallery, which is currently hosting Shiro: Kenya Hara Exhibition, featuring work by graphic designer and theorist-author Kenya Hara. Hara’s work uses a lot of white (a color that was the titular subject of two of his books) and is therefore cleanliness and simplicity at its most refined.
But on the basement level of the gallery is work that would have fit well at 21 21. Here, Hara uses super-water-resistant fiber for a series of experimental works. One sends drops of water down a long track to a parabolic dish, where the perfect beads of water–they look more like mercury than H2O–travel around in a way that is like “you are watching the cosmos.”
Hara also has put this technology into practice, pushing water through pinholes in a sheet of this material to create a logo made of water.
More conventional, yet more epoch-making, was the creation of the Helvetica font by Swiss type designer Max Miedinger in 1957. The 50th anniversary of the most widely used and widely recognized typeface in the world was celebrated with an engaging, award-winning documentary, which is released today on DVD in Japan.
The Helvetica: A Tribute to Typography exhibit at Laforet in Harajuku features a historical look at the font and some of its more famous uses in Japan, including for the Panasonic and National logotypes, though wording from Japan Railway is conspicuous in its absence. In addition to a screening of Helvetica, there is a room of artwork created using only Helvetica, including a drawing of the human circulatory system–using only the words that describe the typeface in which they are drawn, such as bold, regular and ultra light.
“Helvetica is a very beautifully designed font,” Micha Weidmann, the designer behind the Dezeen design blog and art director of this year’s Tokyo Design Week, told The Daily Yomiuri in an e-mail. “I try to avoid it because it is overused and now stands for the most generic look one can achieve these days. Choosing Helvetica is almost like not choosing a font.”
For a dramatic look for this year’s Design Week, Weidmann, who designed covers for London’s influential Time Out magazine, looked to his own Dezeen for inspiration. Among other considerations, he chose not to go with the ubiquitous Helvetica.
“The bold black and white typography [Akzidenz Grotesque] is combined into several icons visualizing Tokyo Design Week as a place for contemporary international design,” he says.
This year marks Designer’s Week’s 23rd year. The five-day event has traditionally attracted tens of thousands of people. Last year’s visitors received a “love button” designed by Michael Young, who is behind the show’s design again this year. This year’s centerpiece will not be much of a stretch for the designer–the “gold love button.”
With so much focusing on the present and future of commercial and graphic design, Life and Art: Arts & Crafts from Morris to Mingei, currently at Kyoto Museum of Contemporary Art (the show will move to Tokyo next year) and Arts & Crafts Movement in UK and USA at the Shiodome Museum in Tokyo, offer a chance to see the 19th-century British movement and the men who played a major role in both the product design and font design that we see around us today.
(Oct. 24, 2008)
