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Kenya Hara    

Japanese Designer & Author

Kenya Hara's design work is deeply rooted in Japanese culture, as demonstrated by the programmes he designed for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympic Games.

Hara graduated in 1983 with a Master's degree in design from Musashino Art University and soon after, joined the Nippon Design Centre. In 1992, he started Hara Design Institute within Nippon. He was the art director responsible for demonstrating new possibilities in sign design through signage planning for Umeda Hospital and Katta Hospital.

He has held a one-man show in Poland, solo exhibitions and lectures in Toronto, New York, Guanajuato (Mexico) and Sao Paulo, and the RE-DESIGN exhibition tour through the UK, Denmark, and the Americas. Hara's publications include a collection of essays titled Please Steal Posters and The Mystery of Macaroni Holes, a co-authored package design anthology. Since 2001 he has been a board member of the no-name brand, Muji.

News

Kenya Hara: the future of design
Sitting at a plain white table in a meeting room high up on the 12th floor of a narrow building in central Tokyo, product designer Kenya Hara asks me to picture a shallow plate in my mind. “Now imagine a slightly deeper plate,” Hara says, “that gets deeper and deeper and eventually becomes a bowl.”
Kenya Hara on the future of Japanese design
In October 1992, about 16 million people held manufacturing jobs in Japan. By the beginning of last year that figure had fallen to 10 million, the lowest for over 50 years. Having revolutionised manufacturing during the second half of the 20th Century, Japan has lost out to cheaper producers in South Korea, China and Taiwan.
An Insightful Interview with Japanese Designer Kenya Hara
There’s a great interview with Kenya Hara over on Japan Times where he speaks about the future of design. It’s interesting to read that Hara’s idea of the future are intrinsically tied to the past, that Japan needs to change in order to move forward.

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