Continuing the series of freelance features that I’ve written for Computer Arts Projects magazine, “Beauty and the East” is an article that looks at some of Japan’s biggest (and oddest) design projects. It appears in issue 118.
It’s easy to have preconceived ideas about Japanese design. On the one hand, Japanese pop culture is infused with a cult of cuteness (‘kawaii’) that has its roots in the 1970s. Saucer-eyed cartoon characters abound – from international icons like Hello Kitty and Pokemon, to the hundreds of lesser-known toons designed to sell Japanese snacks and washing powder.
Yet this pervasive Japanese cuteness also collides head-on with a harder-edged techno-futurism. This ‘Neo-Japan’ is defined by its high-tech industrialism – its bullet-nosed Shinkansen trains, exotic robotics and advanced mobile phones.
Modern Japanese design is a heady mix of familiar 20th Century art and new millennial experimentation. While kawaii and manga remain wildly popular, it’s been suggested that Japanese art is reinventing itself.
If the recent ‘Wa: The Spirit of Harmony and Japanese Design Today’ exhibition in Paris was anything to go by, contemporary Japanese design is becoming more experimental, exploring texture, touch, minimalism and sensitivity. In short, it’s all about the “experience.”
And so on… The article covers design projects that range from videogames like Final Fantasy XIII to the latest in wearable robotics – the Nissan Pivo2 single-seat concept vehicle; Cyberdyne’s Robot HAL exoskeleton.
The picture here is of ‘Keitai Girl’, Noriko Yamaguchi’s futuristic vision of runaway technological advancement. “We are living in cyberspace connected to people around the world and losing physical communication and sensation,” Yamaguchi says. “Keitai Girl is in a way a caricature of today’s people.”
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