The past year appears to have been one of evolving, socially conscious design. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, changes in lifestyle and increased environmental awareness have made Japan’s predilection for natural materials — wood, leather, stone and earth — even more prominent in product design. Plenty of natural-style homeware goods were launched, with some creators exploring new renewable and recycled materials. The boundaries between manufacturing, craft, contemporary design and fine art were also blurred further as small businesses and factories teamed up with designers and regional events.
Sustainability to stay
Recycling materials has cropped up in the past, often in projects that repurpose waste products into goods such as Komatsu Matere’s use of offcuts and leftover textiles for its Mate-Mono brand of bags and Newsed’s accessories made from the offcuts of glasses frame factories. Until recently, however, breaking down waste into an ingredient for a new material seemed limited to reprocessing PET bottle plastic and other synthetics into fibers for textiles.
In May, the Material Driven Innovation Awards highlighted developments in new, environmentally friendly solid materials, including Studio Relight’s recycled glass panels and ForestBank’s slabs of resin embedded with forestry and woodworking industry waste. Other Japanese material innovations covered in On: Design include: L.F.M’s moldable reprocessed leather scraps; Paneco’s fiberboard made with discarded clothing; and LandLoop’s bioplastic composed of biomass sources such as wood waste and used coffee grounds.
These new materials, most of which are complex and still expensive to produce, will need more exposure to become commonplace in product design, but various events and trade fairs this year already showcased their potential. Both Milan Salone in June and Designart Tokyo in October, for example, featured Paneco display units and a lighting installation made from recycled light bulb glass by Hiroto Yoshizoe, while Designart’s “Next Circulation” exhibition also showcased ForestBank furniture and 3D-printed artworks made of LandLoop plastics.
Craft without borders
During the worst of the pandemic, being confined indoors brought out the inner interior designer in many people. Though the resulting homeware boom is beginning to wane, there’s still interest in artisanal household furnishings — both kōgei (traditional Japanese crafts) objects and contemporary design goods. Minimalism always featured strongly with such products in Japan, but recently there’s been a refreshing revival of color and pattern as well as an emphasis on the artistic and design potential of kōgei techniques.
At Milan Salone, two Japanese exhibitors chose to present craft products as major eye-catching visual art installations. Kyoto textile weavers Kawashima Selkon’s bold new fabrics covered enormous three-dimensional abstract forms, while Tajimi Custom Tiles brought together furniture-like sculptural works designed by a coterie of international creators. Elsewhere, the October Go For Kogei festival in the Hokuriku region introduced visitors to dynamic and vivid installations by numerous artists trained in or heavily influenced by local kōgei, such as glassmaking, ceramics, lacquerware and textiles.
“Genreless Kogei,” an exhibition that ran at Tokyo’s National Crafts Museum last month, perhaps sums up this growing shift in perception of traditional crafts. The exhibition’s works — a selection of tableware by former living national treasures and contemporary craftspeople shown alongside visual art pieces — was a reminder that the academic debate as to whether kōgei is fine art or functional design is moot if its evolution opens it up to a wider audience.
Factory finesse
Japan’s manufacturing businesses received a lot of attention in 2022. In October, after two years of COVID-19 restrictions forcing the Tsubame-Sanjo Factory Festival online, the event in Niigata Prefecture finally reopened the doors to 82 metalware factories and other businesses to the public. The past popularity of the festival, which was first held in 2013, inspired similar industrial tourism initiatives, such as Osaka Prefecture’s Factorism and Renew in Fukui Prefecture, both of which also returned in full force this year.
In the same way traditional crafts often influence contemporary design, factories are beginning to inspire young designers. Usually local and relatively small businesses, these are best known for producing machinery, automobile and electronics parts. Yet more young designers are finding ways to utilize their molding, bending, cutting, plating, polishing and other precision manufacturing techniques for stylish homeware goods.
Such collaborations are close relationships that involve designers observing factories before designing, sometimes at the manufacturer’s request. On: Design covered Plate Picnic, a Toyama Prefecture-based machine-parts manufacturer’s own brand of designer interior goods, as well as Uenosuke Shitanosuke, a plastics processing company’s lineup of tumblers and KaB Design’s Adachidoug-ten collection of homeware items made in Adachi, Tokyo's machi-kōba (small, urban factories) district.
The April publication of “Sankaku Vol. 1,” an English-language book focusing on machi-kōba, also provided an indication of a growing interest in Japan’s small factories internationally. Though Sankaku released only 100 copies of the book for its first run, to the independent media publisher’s surprise, it sold out within one week.
Now that Japan has finally fully opened its borders to overseas visitors, let's hope that the past year’s progress in design and manufacturing will start receiving even more attention on an international level.
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