thoughtful consumption
Muji foldable cardboard speakers
A story in the New York Times Style magazine about the Japanese store Muji:
Muji rebelled against the more-is-more credo that Western luxury houses were greedily promoting in Asia, and made a name for itself by recycling and curtailing waste: a 1981 ad for canned salmon flakes, which utilized parts of the fish that tend to be discarded, urged foodies to ‘‘enjoy every edible part of the salmon, from head to tail!” (Take that, Fergus Henderson.)
In Japan, Muji currently sells Bread Crust Snacks – packets of chips made from what you trim off sandwiches – and Pie With Eggshells, which apparently has a lot of calcium and is good for you. Colorful socks and tank tops are made from excess yarn discarded during production of other garments; a cool, crinkly T-shirt is folded upon itself to create a perfect cube, eliminating the need for superfluous packaging. Even the more upscale items, like bicycles, home furnishings and an award-winning, wall-mounted CD player, flaunt a proudly minimalist aesthetic.
Muji’s frill-free philosophy seems particularly on-target now that the design world is veering toward understatement and familiar shapes instead of the ‘‘forward-thinking” (read: overdesigned) gizmos and doodads that we have gotten so used to lately. …
‘‘People tend to look for something new or radical,” says Naoto Fukasawa, who has been Muji’s design adviser since 2002. ‘‘But I don’t think these new items can replace others with history. The fact that things last through time is their strength and value.”
To prove his point, Fukasawa recently curated an exhibition titled ‘‘Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary” in collaboration with the designer Jasper Morrison. They displayed 210 everyday objects (a Seiko watch, a plain plastic bucket, a Bic lighter) whose main appeal, according to the supernormal, sensationally ordinary paperback that accompanied the show, is ‘‘the capacity to conceal its features until they become virtually invisible.” In other words, products whose design is so instinctive that it’s as if they had never been designed at all. Not surprising, several Muji classics (a calculator, an air filter and a kettle, among others) made the cut.
