Before I dive into Kenya Hara’s “What is Design?”, I feel the need to answer that question from my own perspective before recapping on theirs. Design, to me, is a way of putting images together to communicate a certain idea; it can contain many purposes, among them propaganda, persuasion, information, or simply the sharing of an emotion.This is not the passive capturing of a gorgeous landscape that is the exigence of photographers today, but the active planning and creation of images and text in order to shape them to the artist’s intention.
Hara, in some way, agrees with this hasty explanation. The design that is discussed in their book involves the reawakening of everyone’s mundane life and forcing everyone, not just the artist, to look at it from a fresh perspective. Remaining open to the variety of life around the world is key to making this type of design work for the artist.
To better understand design, Hara references the very beginnings of design, back from when the caveman first picked up sticks and used his hands to shape his environment, to the introduction of “industrial mechanism” (Hara 417) in manufactured goods evoking backlash from some of Europe’s finest artisans. The workers who put so much effort into protesting the mass production of goods in turn produced a huge amount of objects that could only be shaped with human hands, and in doing so produced the foundations for concept of modern design that society is familiar with today.
The one other movement that Hara believes also contributed to modern design is the Bauhaus movement, in 1930s Germany. This movement actually embraced the new industrialization of the economy, seeing chances in it that could help improve many of their ideas. Design, in this movement, was pulled along with industrialization to a point where design simply became a part of the economy, in order to fuel the huge wave of consumption. In some ways, it seems as if Hara believes that the concept of design cannot be separated from the concept of the world economy. The two have become too entangled together as the world became more connected, particularly in countries such as the United States and Japan, where marketing is a huge part of the economy.
Today, Hara intertwines the ideas of modern design with the incredible boom in information technology. Hara also introduces the idea that society is looking at design in a way that is actually harmful to its development: as a constant evolution that is perpetually shaming the designs of yesterday. Instead, Hara encourages the readers to view design, and the materials of the modern age, as something that can be conceived from the normalcy of our everyday lives, not as a concept that can only come from entirely new material. “The old accepts the new” (Hara 435), in other words, and can then form a myriad of new ideas from that combination, and so on and so on.
In light of this exploration into the history of design, I see that my perception of design at the beginning failed to include much of the depth that context can bring to design’s origins. Since I myself plan to become a designer, I should attempt to look at the everyday events in my life from a completely new perspective. Only then, I think, can I begin to view design the way that Hara sees it: through the eyes of history, and with the possibilities of the future at hand.