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Book review: Super Normal and Designing Design

20 May 2009

Mark Adams, managing director of Vitsœ reviews Kenya Hara’s Designing Design and Jasper Morrison with Naoto Fukasawa’s Super Normal.

I am the most demanding of consumers. Whether in a shop, restaurant, gallery or museum, my senses are constantly alert: sifting, filtering, analysing and reacting to the surfeit of incoming messages. From deep within I am always searching for that blissful, unexpected delight that can come from nowhere: watching the tiniest details that allow a family-run Italian restaurant to operate with delicious efficiency, without computers and with only the minimum applied to paper. For years my measuring device has been a constant: can any task be done better but by using less? Can we live happier more fulfilled lives by not constantly seeking more?

On the day that a copy of ‘Designing Design’ arrived, my senses had been blunted by the drudgery of some necessary but underwhelming meetings that lurk behind the apparent glamour of designing, making and retailing modern furniture. I found the most modest of books: weighty clearly, but with simple black print applied to a white partial dust jacket wrapping around a white full dust jacket which quietly proclaimed ‘DESIGNING DESIGN’ (yes, in capitals). “Mmmm”, I thought, “a serious book”. And then I opened it. I looked but, most importantly, I touched. The hairs on the back of my neck leapt. My body tingled. Not for the last time with this book, I smiled openly. I had been transported to a special place. (E-book readers will be very influential but, if you fear for the future of the paper book, look no further than ‘Designing Design’.)

The first three pages of the book are endpapers, and they are blank. The first leaf serves to protect the next one which is, in turn, protecting the real star, the third one. It is slightly smaller than the size of the book and is thus framed by the first of 471 text-pages that lies behind. I have always had a weakness for handmade paper – and here it is, at its laid, gossamer, finest, best. Visible through this exquisite sheet are the first printed words of the book, “Verbalizing design is another act of design. Kenya Hara”. As I ran my fingers back and forth, back and forth over the understated quality of that first printed page, I felt like one of the forgery detectors who work at the Bank of England and spot most forgeries with their finger-tips, not with their eyes. I knew that I was in a rare place. The “verbalizing” now had a lot to live up to. (Incidentally, page 471 kindly tells you the source of these sumptuous materials.) Suddenly, that increasingly brutal world that we all inhabit is far, far away.

But before taking that pleasurable dive into a beckoning swimming pool on a stifling day, let me linger for a few seconds more. On closer inspection, the title on the dust jacket is subtly embossed; the printed name of Lars Müller Publishers is not. Now remove the jacket and look at the cover. Uh oh. When you buy the book, just do it. Now, dive.

The water temperature is perfect: just bracing enough to be thoroughly refreshing but not so warm as to disappoint after a few minutes. Welcome to the graphic design of Kenya Hara. I defy you not to spend some while searching for your favourite spread. The contents’ pages are serene in their majesty but quickly find yourself a double-page spread with only text…and then marvel. Hark at the quiet treatment of the photographs (we are far away from the coffee table, here) but make sure that you find and open the gate-fold in the Muji chapter. Once you settle yourself to read this book, again I defy you not to smile occasionally when you turn one page to witness the next. For me, they were pages 210 and 211: the only text is “4 WHITE”. Take a look.

“Verbalizing”? Books have words? But Kenya Hara is Japanese and this book is in English (American, to be precise)? Prepare to be disappointed? Back to page 471: “Translation: Maggie Kinser Hohle, Yukiko Naito”. Their work is meticulous and exemplary. Wherever you read you will find erudition of the highest order. There was nowhere in this book that my attention wavered or my joy was reduced as I read. In fact, I often found myself going back and re-reading, such were the nuances of text that I was discovering. Words such as “whisper”, “quiet”, “observation”, “perception”, “barefoot”, “delicate”, “skin”, “revival of sensitivity” and “human being” pepper the book.

Given Kenya Hara’s greater exposure in recent years you might have unwittingly become aware of him in his role as art director of Muji since 2001. He has called Muji “Nothing, yet everything” and articulates the advertising he has created for the company as “emptiness”. Controversially he has compared his vision for Muji’s brand with the Japanese flag: a simple object but one which has sharply different meanings for different observers. He summarises Muji’s advertising concept, “…communication becomes effective only when an advertisement is offered as an empty vessel and viewers freely deposit into it their ideas and wishes.” On reading this I was instantly struck by the parallels with the ethos of my company, Vitsœ. Not only are we constantly encouraging our customers to buy less of our furniture (that has been in continuous production for almost 50 years) because they know that they can return for more as and when they need it, but they appreciate the invisibility of our shelving system that allows them to express their own individuality.

You might also have become aware of Kenya Hara because his exhibition, ‘Haptic’ , has been touring the world since 2004 and recently visited RIBA, London. The sub-title of the exhibition was “The Awakening of the Five Senses.” Hara explains, “A human being is like a rubber ball wrapped in an extremely delicate membrane. Different areas on the ball’s surface elicit different senses.” Which takes me back via those forgery detectors to one of my very first meetings with Niels Vitsœ (who founded Vitsœ) and the German designer, Dieter Rams, who designed Vitsœ’s shelving system. At that meeting they were being presented with product components for comment and approval. Typically, they were chatting effusively as the components were handed to them. I noted that they took them in their hands, continued talking but did not look at the components. However, their fingers were now at work, feeling and caressing the details. After a while, there was a break in the chatter and, almost simultaneously, each glanced at their component, handed it back and pronounced it acceptable. The work had been done with their hands. Haptic.

As I have mentioned the product that Dieter Rams calls his “most perfect design” and for which Vitsœ has become best known, I should move sideways to another publication of Lars Müller Publishers, ‘Super Normal, Sensations of the Ordinary’ by Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison (it includes a discreet mention for Vitsœ’s 606 Universal Shelving System). This book accompanies Fukasawa and Morrison’s eponymous exhibitions in Tokyo and London; exhibitions that have not been without their critics for the reason of attempting to elevate normal and even daring to add “super” to normal. How can it remain normal if it is now deemed super? Which comes to the nub of why some of us attempt to bring normality, simplicity, invisibility – yes, less – to the world about us.

Based on my questioning over the years, too few people have read ‘The Paradox of Choice’ by Barry Schwartz. He analyses, amongst others, the pain of choosing from 120 different shampoos in the supermarket. When I read it, I was shocked. Shocked because it confirmed – scientifically – why I have spent my adult life persuading people of the merits of less choice, buying less and making what you buy last longer; frankly, of resisting short-term, superficial gratification that only serves to, as David Bowie sang, “put out the fire with gasoline”. In a focus-group driven world, when offered it, virtually everyone will opt for more choice. If we behaved in this way at Vitsœ our shelving system would be available in every Pantone colour and each shelf would be offered in myriad widths and depths. Yet, after half a century, our shelving system is offered in three colours, two widths and four depths. (As the vast majority of customers opt for the same colour, we could probably survive by offering only a single colour.) By restricting choice, customer decisions are less angst-ridden and future supply and compatibility are easier to achieve (Vitsœ supplies customers with additional new shelves for their system that they started buying 40 years ago).

Note that Hara, Fukasawa and Morrison were born in 1958, 1956 and 1959 respectively. Their parents were inevitably brought up during World War II and the subsequent period of great austerity. Certainly in Japan and Europe, brains had to work hard with very little at their disposal. They had to make better from less (whether in the home or the factory). Into this period were pitched Artur and Erwin Braun who took over the Braun domestic electrical products company in Germany when their father died in 1951. They were quick to realise the potential of tapping into the creative resource of the new Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany, when it was established in 1953 to recreate the pre-war spirit of the Bauhaus. Under the guidance of the designers Fritz Eichler, Hans Gugelot and Otl Aicher, Erwin Braun recruited a 23-year-old architecture student, Dieter Rams.

As Dieter Rams recalls, it was a period of great optimism. The Marshall Plan had been a major influence and Europe was being rebuilt by a new generation. The confluence of these factors contributed directly to the designing of a new world – a world in which Rams was about to have an important hand and Hara, Fukasawa and Morrison were being brought up. (It can be no coincidence that Japanese culture was soon to have a major influence on Rams as German and Japanese developments in the newly transistorised and miniaturising world of radio design leapfrogged each other from opposite sides of the globe. Today Rams cites Kenji Ekuan’s ‘The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox’ as a book that makes the link between these worlds.)

The result was an outpouring by Rams and his team of domestic electrical products for Braun (and furniture for Vitsœ) that came to define the latter half of the 20th century. Products that we now see as normal. So normal that is argued they form the template for some of the most influential products of the 21st century. Morrison and Fukasawa wonder idly whether the racing bicycle reached its peak around 1985, “after which improvements may have performance benefits but the object itself suffers an identity crisis.”

Sadly, there is ample evidence in the world of product design that Edward Gibbon’s ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ has lessons for us: how could a society that was so dominant and prevalent decline and fall? Gibbon’s answers are many and remain largely unrefuted since publication in 1776 but fall the Roman Empire did. Britain, for one, was plunged back into the dark ages.

Indeed, how has the developed world become trapped in a positive-feedback loop where the only way ahead is to produce, consume and dispose of ever more of the world’s finite resources? And what about the irony of the developed world infecting the developing world with its values so that, for example, bicycle-dependent cultures such as China and India are rapidly becoming car-desiring cultures while European cities are investing heavily to persuade their inhabitants to abandon cars in favour of bicycles? One does not need to be Lord Stern to realise that the world’s headlong pursuit of more for everyone can only end in tears. There is not enough to go around, so we had better stop creating more and start creating less that is better.

In a JFK moment, I still remember where I was when Niels Vitsœ said to me, “Mark, you have to understand that Vitsœ’s most convinced customers are those who have dealt with us the longest.” Today, the comment from our new customers that we most often hear at Vitsœ is, “I wish I had done this many years ago”. They point out the time, trouble and money that they would have saved by taking a more intelligent – and responsible – long-term decision. Namely, by starting with a few components of Vitsœ’s shelving system and then adding more over time and taking it with them every time they moved home. For many it is the dawning of the stark reality of the true meaning of that apocryphal quote, “I am not rich enough to buy cheaply.”

It was Ezra Pound who said, “Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.” Which reminds us of Hara and the pure, unadulterated delight of opening, seeing, touching and reading his book. It gives profound hope that there are those in the position of modest influence who can encourage, nay implore, others to have belief in societies – Eastern and Western, developed and developing – that the pursuit of happier, more fulfilling lives can result from the most thoughtful creation of less of the very best rather than more of the worst. And when it comes to products, conceiving them to satisfy and last for much longer. Easy to write, more difficult to achieve.

Footnotes

1. Kenya Hara, Kayoko Takeo, Haptic (Tokyo: Masakazu Hanai, 2004)
2. Naoto Fukasawa & Jasper Morrison, Super Normal, Sensations of the Ordinary (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2007)
3. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (London: Harper Collins, 2005)
4. Martin Krampen & Günter Hörmann, The Ulm School of Design: Beginnings of a Project of Unyielding Modernity (Wiley, 2003)
5. Michael J Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952 (Cambridge University Press, 1989)
6. Kenji Ekuan, David B Stewart, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox (MIT Press, 1998)
7. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Strahan & Cadell, 1776-1789)
8. Lord Stern, The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (London: Office of Climate Change, 2006)
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound