Designing Design

By Adib J on April 18, 2008

Designing Design
Kenya Hara

Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
ISBN-10: 303778105X
ISBN-13: 978-3037781050
Hardcover: 467 pages

“Kenya Hara is a complex man. He views the world through his many lenses of seeing, tasting, smelling, erasing, evaporating, and all the forms of construction and deconstruction.” Those are the words by John Maeda as he attempts to introduce Kenya Hara, one of the masters in today’s design world, in the introduction of Designing Design.

Hara, a key member of world famous Muji brings to us a deeply philosophical text about design. As he puts it, “Articulating design is design in itself”. Touching on deep issues about design, Kenya Hara brings to us questions about designing sensations with the concept of haptic design and also asks its readers to think about the importance of emptiness in design. The book also presents some of his exhibitions such as Re-Design: The Daily Products of the 21st Century of 2000.

This white, hardcover book published by Lars Müller Publishers is a truly beautiful as a book and sophisticated design book on both levels; as a book (object) and its content. With intelligent writing and amazingly simple,clean and powerful images, Designing Design fascinates the reader with its poetic-ness and intelligent. It is a book that needs to be read slowly and enjoyed at a calming pace, allowing each page to sink in and have its profound impact on one. With its array of powerful images and diagrams, this book transmits the ideologies deep from the mind of Hara and also other like minded Japanese designers of his time, in a delightful manner yet without losing any of the complexity of the thoughts in it.

This is an important book that should be compulsory reading for anyone who is studying and/or practising design. A strong underlying message that is driven home at the end of the day is probably the idea that one of the goals of design, as envisioned by Hara, is to create products, advertising, and objects of culture in which functionality might meet simplicity with elegance and improve the human condition through the expression of beauty. And of course, to develop an understanding of ‘white’, which to Hara is not just a colour but a whole design concept in itself.