Workshop｜Creative Design City Nagoya 2009

Creative Design City Nagoya 2009

From Now On:Envisioning Nagoya’s Future on the Large Scale and the Small

International New Designers Workshop

B Team: Novelty

Fieldwork:

TOYOTA Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology,
Noritake Garden, Nagoya Castle,
Tokugawa-en and the Cultural Path (Futaba Museum, free-time touring)
Tokoname city (INAX MUSEUMS and Pottery Path)

Proposal Summary:

Title: Nagoya’s Novelty “A Nice Little Thing”

To explore the charm of Nagoya, with the intention of looking at everything as tourists, during our two days of fieldwork, we deliberately abandoned our theme, which was “Novelty”. In Nagoya and Tokoname, we visited places of historical interest and various locations known for monozukuri [making things / manufacturing]. On the first day, we visited the TOYOTA Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology, Noritake Garden, Tokugawa-en and the Cultural Path of Futaba Museum and its environs. On the second day, we toured Tokoname City and the INAX MUSEUMS, a complex of museums including the INAX Tile Museum and INAX Clay Works.
We picked out things that had impressed us during the fieldwork, viewed from the perspective of a tourist. This allowed us to collect keywords that would lead to novelty. Some examples of these keywords were Fitting, Original, Elaborate, Inspirational, Exciting to the touch, and Instigating a chain reaction of the senses. In addition, we learned from our fieldwork that materials like cotton, clay, soil and tiles represent Nagoya. From these clues, we proposed that something people used on a daily basis, such as a “fluffy key case”, would make a great gift.
We used cotton as our material. We focused on the movements of hand spinning, which we first saw at the TOYOTA Commemorative Museum. In the final production process, we were inspired by the idea of making a strap by pulling the end of the thread.
We called our design solution, “A Nice Little Thing,” which meets the criteria of being a “Nagoya Novelty”. Our product is successful because it focuses on the manufacturing process while still maintaining a stance on the receiving side; how nice it would be to get this as a gift.