Hasta La Ideas

We recently had the chance to chat with designer Naoto Fukasawa and IDEO’s Jane Fulton Suri, who served on the jury for last year’s Braunprize selections. As keen observers of the world at large and the man-made objects and obstacles we encounter on a regular basis, both Fukasawa and Suri had plenty of interesting things to say about the current state of design and just what it means to be ‘normal.’.

Core77: It seems that you are both highly attuned to the world around you—or rather, us. Both the Super Normal and Thoughtless Acts document what might be considered as everyday or mundane, but actually have been accepted or adopted by users as conventions. Have either of you noticed memorable examples of these things that we take for granted lately?

Naoto Fukasawa: I have been conducting the ‘Without Thought’ workshop to young designers for over 15 years. In these workshops, what I have been hoping for the participants to understand is that our behaviors and movements are not produced by ourselves thinking of how to move our bodies every second but instead, such acts are produced by our body naturally responding to given situations and environments.

For example, walking is defined by a sequence of movements of our legs and feet: placing one foot forward on the ground and then moving the other to follow. When we recognize a surface that is not the greatest to step on, we naturally avoid it and if we lose balance by doing so, perhaps we try to put our hands on walls and so on. Mountaineering and rock climbing face limited surfaces to place our hands and feet and sometimes the areas everyone subconsciously grabs get polished. Making a decision for a behavior is a response of body beyond one’s consciousness, and in this context, we are all sharing something greater than being individuals: human as bodies.

Our environments, situations and information ignite our behaviors. Specifically, our environments, situations and our body are synchronized to each other and create our environments.

Thoughtless Acts

Jane Fulton Suri: Boarding planes these days there’s always a scramble to find space to stash luggage in an overhead bin—people close the bin when it’s full and thereby simplify the search for everyone. And I see lots of new habits have emerged with our attachment to flat-screen mobile phones: The phone is always with you so it’s a handy bookmark for your magazine when you have to put it down for a minute; it’s a weight to hold the page open when cooking from a recipe book; an immediate surface to attach a sticky-note as a reminder, the lit screen is a flashlight to find the bathroom at night or, in unity with a crowd of fans, to light up a stadium, and if you reverse your phone camera, the screen is better than a mirror for checking if there’s something in your teeth or putting on makeup! Social cues come into play at meetings too: if your phone is placed on the table face down, you’re there to pay attention, if it’s face up, you signal that something else is important!

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