One of the main ambitions of the German year in Japan is to update the image of Germany. Designlab01, the first in a series of young German designers coming to Japan to talk about their work, successfully brought some new, fresh German ideas to Japan.
Written by Uleshka
Volker Albus, designer and professor at the University of Art and Design (HfG Karlsruhe) opened the conference as the first of 3 speakers with a lecture about a new awareness of needs in product design. His speech was a preview of his exhibition “anders als immer” which will tour the globe starting in Cairo this September. Leading away from the question of “What does the consumer need?”, that had ruled German design for such a long time and had lead to a very rational design, the thought behind creation changed to “What else could a consumer possibly want?”- Albus’ selection of products introduce the more recent German design works, which seek the fun, beauty and joy of a product.
Personally, I liked “Zinfandel” by Tom Pawlofsky best, a student’s work which reinvents the idea of a shelf. Giving highest priority to mobility, Pawlofsky designed simple boxes that can be freely arranged inside a soft sponge net. When moving, simply take out the boxes including their content and the lightweight soft frame folds up easily. Manufacturers, please hurry up! I want one!
Zinfandel, ready to use
Zinfandel, ready to move
Another excellent design idea came from Konstantin Grcic: his coathanger brush, which will be produced by Japanese life style maker MUJI in Japan. I also really liked a very elegant floor lamp Volker Albus designed: a big, round, heavy looking lamp directly lying on the ground with a long, metal pole attached to it for easy re-positioning.
clothes-hanger-brush ©Konstantin Grcic
Downlight ©Volker Albus
Another of Volker Albus’ design ideas surprised with quite a funny approach for cleaning shoes- a football-brush. Great to see that Germans and Japanese seem to love soccer equally: Volker’s design was followed by Naoto Fukasawa’s soccer door mat.
Kick&Brush ©Volker Albus
±0, Soccer Mat, Design by Etsuya Adachi, Design Directed by Naoto Fukasawa, Photo by Hidetoyo Sasaki
Men and soccer, what can I say? The two designers got along just perfectly - Volker Albus was a big fan of Fukasawa’s design for a CD player for MUJI, which hangs on the wall and is swiched on like a lamp.
MUJI, CD Player, Photo by Hidetoyo Sasaki
auKDDI, INFOBAR
Volker Albus and Marcus Botsch, the third designer coming to talk at Designlab01, were amazed by Fukasawa’s design for au mobile phone’s “Info bar”: if you don’t use your phone for a long time, the display starts to look mouldy- due to a slow “mould animation”. “Try to explain that kind of humor to German clients!” remarked a stunned Volker Albus.
Marcus Botsch, whose specialization on medical design is quite extraordinary with Berlin Heart AG being one of the main projects of Büro Botsch was happy to share the talk with Naoto Fukasawa for some other reasons, too. They both belong to the very few people in the world, who have been involved into the design of an artificial heart.
Berlin Heart visual ©Büro Botsch
Berlin Heart visual ©Büro Botsch
Talking about corporate design at the press dinner after the conference and how design transports the image of a certain brand, I was surprised to hear members of major Japanese corporations like Mitsubishi and Toto admit that this ability is what they lack most. Whereas BMW or Siemens developed a design language which speaks for themselves, Japanese products often don’t feel like any brand - only the name tag makes it obvious where the design actually comes from.
Fukasawa explained, that when he designs he thinks about the product from his personal point of view, applies what he calls “general behaviour of a consumer”, mixed with his own aesthetics. He then delivers the final product to a company - which usually accepts it the way it is and then put their sticker on it. That may sound like the ideal case for a product designer to sell his products (look at Fukasawa’s designs for everyday products, which were then turned into a whole new brand called ±0 series).
plusminuszero
However, this probably doesn’t help the problem big Japanese companies are trying to solve. With their approach of avoiding differentiation in order to please most of them are in a difficult position now, trying to survive in a competitive market, especially since a global design awareness keeps increasing and people identify themselves more than ever with their brands and products.
A clear message of what a certain product stands for combined with customizing options is what most consumers long for nowadays or - to put it in Albus’ words: “… might be, what else the consumer could possibly want”.
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