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November 18, 2008

Tokyo Design Week

I arrived at 100% Design Tokyo with high hopes - design in Japan is characterized by innovation, subtlety and unexpected functionality, all in gracefully refined packaging. 100% Design displayed none of these characteristics, and was a disappointment right from the start.

It started before I could get in the show. The ticketing system was either malfunctioning or was woefully inadequate to serve the volume of visitors present. I was there right at the start of the first (trade-only) day, fourth in line at my ticketing gate, and it took over 15 minutes to get inside. I was handed a showbag with a little plastic trinket that would have been immediately discarded by 99% of the visitors, then lost by the other 1%. When every trade show is either focused on, or at least acknowledges issues of waste in design, imagining 20,000 little plastic buttons each in their own zip-lock bag going straight from the production line into landfill was discouraging.

Once in, walking past the teams of people still erecting banners and signs (why they were still setting up at 10am I have no idea), the exhibition seemed to rattle in grounds too big. They probably needed the space to cope with the influx of visitors on the public days, but bigger crowds would have made the space even more bewildering.

Wandering around inside the various sections I wanted desperately to be thrilled and excited, after all I had travelled an awfully long way to be there and Tokyo had thus far been amazing, but I could barely stifle a yawn. The show was dominated by junk. A lot of it was pretty or polished or very well-realized, but one could not escape the fact that there were no problems being solved, no clever innovation, just the same useless old products re-done with a gloss that had begun to fade even before its debut.

The trivet has now overtaken the vase (and before that, the kettle) as the most over-designed product available. A trivet, if you're not familiar, is like a coaster for a pot, something that protects your countertop. No-one actually needs one because every kitchen has tea-towels and they're always handy because they're stored on cupboard or drawer handles. They do the job quite adequately, are cheap, durable and plentiful. A wooden chopping board also does double-duty. Nevertheless there is obviously a market for goods that do part of the job of a tea-towel, with no improvement in functionality but great increase in cost, plus less versatility to boot. If you are bent on having one, a trivet need not be difficult to design or manufacture, workshops everywhere are littered with more than enough wood off-cuts to thoroughly satisfy the market. Yet every week I see a new, increasingly complicated, fashionable (in the sense that it is destined to some day be un-fashionable) and expensive trivet announced.

The trivet seemed to be the mascot of 100% Design. Products took its principles to heart - the vast majority of what was on display were solutions to problems that never existed. My beef is not that these trinkets were unnecessary, I am in fact a champion of the unnecessary object. No one artwork is necessary but as a whole, art is very much a necessary part of human expression and communication. I certainly see the value in the things we could survive without.

What was on display was not beauty, though, most of it was bad visual puns and re-hashes of what might once have been seen as "new". And the titles! The name of a product should be used to differentiate pieces of similar functionality in a designer's line-up. Instead, it often seems a designer thought of a clever title and designed a product so that she might be able to use it.

There were exceptions, of course. One of the standouts for me was Zeroperzero's interpretations of three cities' railway maps. They are at first visually arresting, beautiful and easy to decipher, then upon further investigation, reveal themselves to be subject-specific in a charming way. Osaka, for example, is the head of an octopus with arms extending to the neighbouring cities of Kyoto, Nara, Kobe and Wakayama. The octopus is a symbol of Osaka, the main ingredient of Takoyaki, a dish it is famous for. The maps won the iF communication design gold medal.

I didn't go to Design Tide because having blown ¥2000 on 100%, I decided to cut my losses. I did go to several of 100%'s associated events and installations. The most interesting part was when I was riding around looking for an in-store event, I climbed to the third floor of the wrong building and got a great view of Omotesando. The actual exhibition was unremarkable.

It's a shame that the show was such a poor reflection of a country that is certainly no disappointment in the design department. I hope the show's curators are in future a little more discerning and a little less swayed by short-lived trends.

Posted by Piers on November 18, 2008 at 03:09 PM

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