Collab announces the 2024 Design Excellence Award Recipient: Naoto Fukasawa
Courtesy of Naoto Fukasawa Design..
The 2024 Collab Design Excellence Award will honor Tokyo-based designer Naoto Fukasawa (born 1956). With an approach to product design that prioritizes ease of use, aesthetic simplicity, and close attention to the ways mundane objects and environments record the traces of our everyday habits, Fukasawa’s thoughtful and quietly beautiful work has exerted a major influence on contemporary design.
A graduate of the industrial design program at Tama Art University, Fukasawa founded his eponymous studio in 2003 after more than two decades in the field, working initially for Seiko Epson and then the San Francisco-based consultancy ID Two (now IDEO). Best-known for his work as design director of MUJI—the “anti-brand” Japanese consumer goods company—Fukasawa has designed across an enormous range of product categories and materials. Whether shaping electronics for Samsung or collaborating with artisan firms on small-batch production of fine furniture, Fukasawa advocates for a design philosophy of longevity, adaptability, and subtle humor over novelty, ephemerality, and commercialism.
MUJI CD wall-mounted player. Courtesy of Naoto Fukasawa Design.
Not only a prolific practitioner, Fukasawa is also an influential author and educator, now serving as Vice President of his alma mater, Tama Art University. He has also developed an intriguing curatorial practice that advocates for a better understanding of the relationships between craft and industrial production. Fukasawa was a co-founder along with the late fashion designer Issey Miyake of the 21_21 Design Sight Museum, Tokyo’s first design museum, and since 2012 he has served as director of the Nihon Mingei-kan (Japan Folk Crafts Museum), also in Tokyo. In these capacities, he brings his designer’s eye and close attention to function, form, and materiality to exhibitions that explore the many intersections between design, craft, and other types of everyday art. In 2022, he founded the Design Science Foundation to better integrate the fields of science and design in the service of addressing large-scale challenges of sustainability.
The exhibition accompanying the Design Excellence Award will provide a compact survey of Fukasawa’s design work across mediums and contexts of production, presenting a rich array of objects that bring to life his vision of visually minimal, pragmatically functional, and subtly playful design.
