A Quick Look at Japanese Design

I spent this last month studying in Tokyo, and while I was there, I had a chance to visit a Toyota design exhibit. I thought I would throw together a quick blog today showcasing some interesting Japanese product design. The principles of design still apply, but the needs of the Japanese people have lead to some interesting developments.

Here, we see a selection of Japanese design concepts, some old, some more modern. As Japan is an island nation with a climate that generally drifts between sunny and rainy, many of these products take that fact into account.

Pictured here is a closer look at some of the utensils and containers used in preparing and storing Japanese food. 

This simple folded pattern produces an elegant holder for hashi (chopsticks). 

Geta (the shoes at the bottom of the image) are a kind of wooden sandal that resemble clogs. They keep the wearer's feet high off the ground, so there's little chance of getting dirty. I can tell you from experience that they take some getitng used to, but you could liken them to high heels as a fashion correlary.

Of course, there were some new vehicle concepts on display. I skipped the sports cars and went right to this SUV. The pivoting rear seat is a new design meant to help handicapped passengers enter and exit the vehicle easier. This is a clever solution, and much more subtle than the cumbersome elevators and ramps that most manufacturers used to employ to load a wheelchair into a vehicle.

What fun would a showcase be without some fun high-tech concept prototypes? You would think that by now, we would have realized as a people that not everything in the future looks like it came from space. That image of the year 2000 was popular in the 50s, but rather than do away with it, we keep pushing the date forward. Now, this is what the cars of 2050 will look like.

Japan is a leader in the field of robotics. Some speculate that the amount of robot-based entertainment in Japanese popular culture is what inspires so many people to enter the field of robotics. Regardless, this walker prototype is infinitely cooler than the Segway, and illustrates clearly how different cultures view the future of transportation while disregarding all notions of practicality.

So, the next time you look at a product you regularly use, I hope you'll sit down for a little bit and think about what went into designing it. Every product out there is an attempt to solve a particular problem, but remember that your geographical location often has a big effect on the shape that solution will take.