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Visualize and Awaken
Visualize and Awaken deals with the question of how to see the world with new eyes. It is a summary of design research conducted over ten years in a seminar at the art college Musashino where Kenya Hara teaches and serves as a continuation of his earlier work Ex-formation. Awareness of the world emerges only after one has already entered an environment that feels self-evident. In other words, to become aware is to situate oneself within a network of cause and effect, where a sense of stability has formed in relation to one's surroundings; learning that one action leads to another, interpreting signs and anticipating what comes next. As babies are born into this world, they use their sensory organs with full capacity, absorb the rules that govern their environment in and create an image of the world. To create new connections or uncover compelling phenomena in the world, we must observe this "obviousness" and try to step outside of it. The research exhibited here unravels the stable relationship between people and their environment, introducing unfamiliar modes of seeing and perception. It is an experiment that reframes the "ordinary" and the "unusual" while calmly observing the composition of "cognition".
About the author
Born in 1958. Graphic designer Kenya Hara served as the director of the Tokyo Fiber exhibition. He specializes in designing not objects but facts or events, such as identifications and communications. He produced the exhibition "RE-DESIGN_Daily Products of the 21st Century" in 2000, and through it he showed that the most marvelous sources of design were to be found in the context of daily life. In 2002, he became a member of the advisory board of MUJI and also took over as art director. In 2004, he produced the exhibition "HAPTIC_Awakening the Senses". With this exhibition he demonstrated that within the contemporary context of design, in which designers tend to find their motivations spurred on by high technology, in fact vast resources for creation lay dormant in the human senses. He has directed work related to national events, such as the programs for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Nagano Olympics, and the official posters of the Aichi Expo 2005. Based in Tokyo, he has been seeking future communication resources he finds within Japanese culture and technology. His book "Designing Design" has been translated into several Asian languages, and in 2007 he largely rewrote it for translation into English, for publication by Lars Muller Publishers, Switzerland. At present he is the representative of Nippon Design Center Inc. and Professor of Musashino Art University.