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/ Chair, Design Naoto Fukasawa

To understand Naoto Fukasawa’s work, you may first want to tune out the world and put your mind into a quiet place. It is about sensing and perception rather than thinking out loud. For the last few years, Fukasawa has been working on the concept ‘without thought’. This is an effort to rediscover how people unconsciously put to use whatever is convenient and available around them to make themselves comfortable – and function properly – and then give the most dissolving form to support such activities. Dissolving? Let me elaborate.

Two ideas: you may be walking on a steep mountain trail. As you breathlessly climb, a random collection of rocks on the ground would suddenly suggest a flight of stairs. Or, you might arrive at your friend’s house on a rainy day, and there is no umbrella stand. You would carefully place the tip of your umbrella against a long groove embedded in the floor tiles, so that it will not fall.

When we say ‘dissolving’, we are talking about objects that dissolve into their environments, becoming part of the whole. For Fukasawa, the ideal is this: the act of design is accomplished, and the purpose is fulfilled, yet the designed object is almost absent – dissolved into its surroundings. So, in the latter example, his ideal umbrella stand would not be a bucket, but rather a slim gutter on the floor that might or might not be discovered by the guests as a spot to place their umbrellas. Fukasawa bases his approach on the work of American psychologist James J. Gibson (1904–1979), who created the concept known as ‘affordances’ – regarding the complementary relationship between animals (including humans) and their environment. Fukasawa believes we are constantly given affordances – such as the rock ‘stairs’ – and that, as primitive animals, we are reading and sensing them as we walk, as we see, as we touch, and so on.

Fukasawa finds affordances even in the most complicated modern environments. For example, a teenager in Tokyo is walking in the subway station, text-messaging. While his eyes are fixed on the small screen of his mobile phone, he steps confidently forward along the bumpy yellow plastic strip that had originally been installed for blind people but has afforded him this different use. Environment is shaped not only by nature, but also by manmade objects, social customs, trends and even our mood.

What about chairs, then? For Vitra Edition, Fukasawa seeks to extract the most primitive and iconic relationship between you and the environment when you are about to sit down in different circumstances. Even as he tries to minimize the sitter’s awareness of the designer’s intention, his wit is apparent. His work understands: as people move through the world, the environment anticipates and responds, often kindly.

Noriku Takiguchi