Three weeks ago, Tokyo invited designers from all over the world to show their work at three major design events — Tokyo Designers Week, DesignTide and Design Touch — as well as at a host of other exhibitions scattered across the city. Here are some of our product picks from those shows.
Please note that most of these products were presented as prototypes, with no set manufacturing plans. Our hope is that many of these will see production in 2011.
A lot of the products at Design Week were chosen to show off a new functionality or innovative feature, but Hiroki Takada's Tea Ceremony Chair is all about aesthetics. Featured as part of Tokyo Designers Week's "Professional Exhibition," the bamboo chair takes the form of a traditional Japanese tea-ceremony whisk. Quintessentially Japanese, yet unusual and attractive, it's already found a home in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Arts and Design (MAD).