Isao Hosoe

About

Isao Hosoe is a Japanese born designer who has settled in Italy since the 60’s. He has an educational background in Aerospace Engineering and has obtained a Master of Science. He has been a teacher in various post-secondary education institutions. Approaching the idea of innovation from a neomadic perspective (a culture of sharing rather than one of consumption), he enriches the Italian culture by bringing new innovation and phenomenon into Italian Design. Hosoe brought with him a different culture and different knowledges and methods. He innovates based on his design philosophies and design processes. In his projects, he tends to create designs that are "interesting" and meaningful for the users and the critics. He apprehends that good design comes from applications of knowledge and sensibility.

Interview Ideas

Culture

Ideas and cultures influence us and surround our lives. This influence is the most important part of cultural development. Culture is consisted of a mixture of ideas from other estates, a sense of mesh up. Isao Hosoe mentions that having various influences on a culture doesn't necessarily mean that they would take on positive stands, but negative aspects of the situation can become positive when the community shares and accepts the ideas. This has been a core idea of Italian design.

Be a Foreigner

Hosoe remarked that when people move to a country, immigrants tend to have differences in the way they look or think. It is important for designers to make themselves feel different, even though they may not have visible differences. Being different evokes a designer to push the standards by enriching his work, branching out in other directions. It is a strategy that stimulates a designer's creativity to pursue something that has never been done. Economically, it is beneficial for the country or the city to have immigrants because they distributes richness into the culture.

Luckiness to Quality

Sometimes we forget or we are unable to find the matching element. Taking the Hebi Lamp as an example, an important element, the base, was not incorporated into it. The Hebi lamp was a bricolage project that was formulated by collecting and assembling existing parts. In a sense, the project represents luckiness by not having a standard base. Without the base, the Hebi lamp was different, having the advantage of greater flexibility over the other lamps. The lack of an essential and important element, the base, in that product may be considered a disadvantage, but in this case it became an advantage. In a sense, the project was a result of a "luckiness in lacking."

Internet as a Medium

Internet has become a normality for designers, as they can learn vast amounts of knowledge through the Internet. If we are professionally trained designers and we understand the culture of design, we can tell a copy of a design from the original source. "[Designers] need strict sense of originality to perceive it." When designers find interesting sources, it is not necessary to directly incorporate them. Internet is not a medium for imitation. Critiques in Europe are not quick to criticize certain designs as copies. Economically, journalists need clients and they keep a good relationship with them; therefore they don't say anything. This is also evident in Italy. Journalists cannot be critiques, and when there are no critiques it forms a cultural dilemma. The 60's consciousness of critiquing has been a little bit destroyed. Even famous designers and manufacturers together produce imitations without knowing. These results can be regarded as a lack of knowledge and sensibility. In some cases, open source might lead to a lower quality when used for business competitions.

Design Education

In the 60's there had been 1 or 2 private design schools. In comparison, public schools did not have a design faculty but practiced design in reality. A survey discussion once said that "thanks to the fact that we don't have design schools in italy, we have design," as a half joke, half reality statement. Designers have been considered as artists. But being an artist has been traditionally respected and endowed with social status due to the Italian design heritage and reputation around the world. Engineers and artists have been considered to be important. The industrial revolution could not have happened without engineers; they were the ones who conducted the machines. In the past, most of the company presidents were engineers as opposed to artists. Although artists have been respected, engineers conducted the company. Engineers controlled the fluctuation of the company through 100 years of industrialization. School in the past were constructed to sustain technological capitalist evolution. With the development of design schools in italy, public or private, students who have studied design can now present their understandings and visions. Creativity is the key element, even though the student may work in various professions and industries.

Quality takes Time

Human factors are the fundamental and important elements in design. High-technology is not comprehended by everyone; it has to be understood and appreciated by high-technology users. If it is not, high-technology becomes obsolete. The most important element in design is not the high-technology but how it aids to design for the greater good and create more meaningful and "interesting" objects. Designers can ease the development process and engineers can produce the high-technology. The high-tech can say "a lot of memory space," but people cannot process that idea with ease because there is no consciousness. In this case, designers are more valuable than engineers. Engineers produce more memory space while designers try to create positive appreciation of the product. "Low technology is welcomed to a high-tech human interface. Substituting low technology into high technology, it is a child's play. The contrary is very difficult [to do]."

Video/Key Quotes

What We Learned

Isao Hosoe's design approach is directed by his philosophies and past experiences. Beyond industrialization, he emphasizes the idea of a Neomadic design culture. He uses philosophies inspired from natural elements such as rippling water and shattered glass. They are analogies which have been naturalized in our lives and are seen as common elements of design. Design is not all about process but a way of understanding and thinking critically of what "interesting" means. The Hebi Lamp did not have to have a standard base and that made it "interesting" and different.

Being different is a vague statement but in some cases he was referring to cultures. Immigrants may have design disadvantages when it comes to unfamiliar surroundings. As Hosoe indicates, cultures have negative and positive elements. It's how we choose to utilize them to aid designers to be different or unique. Hosoe uses water and glass to understand fluidity and solidity. There has to be a fine balance between the "fluid" and the "solid" to make a good solution that is interesting.

Bricolage is an idea with which Hosoe creates some of his projects. Bricolage is not about inventing new solutions but to solve them with existing elements. By doing so, designers are able to reevaluate the solutions to find important and non-standardized elements. This can make the solutions unique and interesting by becoming different from others. All of his methods and philosophies are aimed at sustaining human and cultural interactions.

Link to Isao Hosoe Lecture Page