From paper shredders and cellphones to a chandelier and tea bags, Fukasawa has developed dozens of products in nearly three decades as one of Japan’s most influential designers. He strives to ensure that people will use each of them as casually as they chucked their trash into that bicycle basket. “You shouldn’t need to use an instruction manual to learn how to use a product,” he said. “It should be so intuitive that you work it out naturally.”
His peers have no doubt that he has succeeded. “Naoto’s great skill is in combining humor, concept and function into a package, which seems so natural that it is accessible to us all immediately and without instructions,” explained the British designer Jasper Morrison. “He communicates an object’s purpose on an intuitive level, and we somehow receive his message with a mixture of the pleasure of understanding something clever, and the satisfaction of mastering a new piece of equipment.”
Check out the full article at The International Herald Tribune on Design.
