Hasta La Ideas

It’s been a while since I’ve seen any good urazawa, that being a Japanese word that loosely translates to a secret trick or shortcut to doing something, and commonly means something like “household tips” or life hacks. Urazawa are kind of a counterpoint to product design in that they’re about solving problems, but through the user’s behavior rather than refining the form of something. As we saw in Lisa Katayama’s book on the subject, they can be something as simple as using newspapers to clean windows (to leave them streak-free) or as involved as boiling spinach to get coffee stains out of a carpet.

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