Designing design: more insights from Kenya Hara, Part 2
Reading and rereading Kenya Hara’s writings, I switch back and forth between reading through the lens of a designer and the lens of a counselor. Ultimately, this work just needs to be read as a human being. His writings suggest a lifestyle of thoughtfulness, compassion, relationship and breakthrough. There is so much more that I have not included, and these are just some insights to bring into a development of well-being. I encourage anyone who resonates with his words to pick up his books and consider integrating design thinking into their way of life.
On sensing
“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.”
On unknowing
“To know something is to impregnate the senses with an inspirational, vital, exciting experience. Yet, because the information supply has exceeded critical mass, at some point unbeknownst to us, knowledge ceased functioning as a medium to activate thought and piles of information, like seeds not germinated, were reduced to an ambiguous condition; we can’t tell whether they’re dead or alive.
On curiosity
Kenya Hara uses the example of a guidebook for travel to help us find an entrance into curiosity. Traveling by following a guidebook is merely sightseeing. The visitor’s desire is to see expected scenes. Following a guidebook throughout a city doesn’t necessarily mean you actually leave knowing anything about that city. However, what if there is a guidebook that helps the visitor awaken to the truth of how little is known about a metropolis and sense what is fresh and unknown?
“If we can recognize that we know so little, a method for finding out how little we know will become clear as well.”
“The more carefully we look, the more individuality we find.”
On creativity
“Constantly pushing the era forward isn’t always progress. We stand between the future and the past. I wonder if we could discover a key to our creativity not in the far-off target at which all of society stares so intently, but rather in the extension of a vision that looks right through society from the past. The future lies ahead of us, but behind us there is also a great accumulation of history—a resource for imagination and creativity. I think we call creative that dynamism of intellectual conception that flows back and forth between the future and the past.”
“Today’s designers are beginning to realize that endless possibilities for design lie dormant not just in the new situations brought on by technology, but also in the common circumstances of our daily lives. Creation of novel things is not the only creativity. The sensibility that allows one to rediscover the unknown in the familiar is equally creative. We hold a great accumulation of culture in our own hands, yet we remain unaware of its value.”
On systems
“Society has no mercy for those who can’t keep up with the times… We are so excessively and frantically competitive that we have repeatedly planted unsteady system in unsteady ground, which have evolved into a variety of trunk systems that are weak and liable to fail, but we have been left to develop anyway.”
“The computer is not a tool but a material. So says John Maeda a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The implication is that we shouldn’t use computers in the manner of just swallowing whatever software comes along, but need to think deeply and carefully about what kind of intellectual world can be cultivated based on this new material that operates with numbers. I think his suggestion deserves our respect. For any material to become a superb material, we need to purify its distinguishing attributes as much as possible. As a material for modeling and carving, clay has endless plasticity, but that limitless plasticity is not unrelated to the material’s development. If it were filled with nails and other shards of metal, we wouldn’t be able to knead it to a usable consistency. These days it’s as if we’re kneading the clay until our hands bleed. I have trouble believing that anything generated in this kind of impossible situation is going to bring any satisfaction to our lives.”
On the ordinary
“Design is the energetic acknowledgement of our own living world through the making of things and through communication… New things are not born of nothingness, and they are not taken without, but from our attempts to boldly awaken our everyday existences, which seem ordinary and mundane. Design is the provocation of the senses and a way of making us discern the world afresh.”
“Just as simply as donning sunglasses makes the world look fresher to us, there is an unlimited number of ways of looking at things, and most of them haven’t been discovered yet. To awaken and activate those new ways of perceiving things is to enrich our cognitive faculty, and this relates to the enrichment of the relationship between objects and human beings. Design is not the act of amazing an audience with the novelty of forms or materials; it is the originality that repeatedly extracts astounding ideas from the crevices of the very commonness of everyday life.”
