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/ Naoto Fukasawa

I am very interested in the American cognitive psychologist James Gibson’s research into “affordance“. Affordance is not a stimulus; it refers to the value that an environment affords people in a given situation. We can then define people continuously gaining affordance from an environment as “action“. Observation connected to design ideas means discovering the kind of noticeable affordance people attain under a particular set of circumstances, such as hanging one’s jacket on the back of a chair or putting your hands on the desk when you stand up. The position of your hands under those conditions is a noticeable affordance. Putting it another way, it is “the act of doing“ under those particular circumstances.

The act of sitting was around before the chair came into existence. A rock or fallen tree in a particular place are types of affordance, affording the act of sitting naturally in those particular circumstances. Even after the chair came into existence, it is possible to see individual choices for sitting all around us. It may be an aluminium suitcase at an airport or train station, a bale of hay on a farm, the stump of a large tree or a wad of felt. Or it may be leaning against a marble sculpture while waiting for someone. For those choosing to sit under these kinds of circumstances, there are materials or structures that make sitting possible, or that allow sitting. Given a particular set of circumstances, everyone chooses a particular object or material as the natural thing on which to sit. What is chosen is not a chair; but this group of works, entitled “Chair“ is something that expresses this noticeable relationship, giving it the shape of a chair. It is irrefutable that Vitra is the greatest chair manufacturer in the world; the fact that Vitra named these “things to sit on“ – which are hard to define both as chairs and as works of art – makes “Chair’ very significant. The shape of these “things to sit on“ is very symbolically chair-like.

Given a particular set of circumstances, people typically engage in the same behaviours. I believe it is best to design things that do not interfere with these natural noticeable behaviours. I think this also characterizes the traditional Japanese approach to creating things. You could also say that these behaviours, these objects, are “normal“ or “common sense“, so that we may say, “Well, at times like that you’d normally sit there, right“. The only thing that can impede people’s common sense, normal behaviours is man’s conscious intentions; the best choices are made without thought.

Naoto Fukasawa