Opening the door

photo_press.jpg We held the press conference of our “House Vision Exhibition”. After our successful workshops and seminars in Tokyo and Beijing, we are finally starting our preparation for this exhibition. This, of course, is not our final goal, but one of our significant steps, since we could visualize the prospect of real estate industry through this exhibition. Nowadays, the housing industry is no longer isolated, but combining with other industries. So visualize its development trend is of great importance. We suppose the trend neither from experience nor from theory. I strongly believe that the ‘abduction’ by Charles Sanders Peirce (an American philosopher), which refers to ‘imagination’, is vital for the creativity of the designers.
Maybe in the period that both the economy and the housing industry developed smoothly, the designers only focused on the style of the commercial products and the impact of their brand image. But when the future trend of the industry is ambiguous and unpredictable, the designers have to “visualize” the potential products. The “house” will be endued with various value and vision, including high technologies applied to energy, transportation, communication and household appliances, “vision of happiness” pursued by adults and adapt to a mature market, “representation” of the Japanese traditions and aesthetic consciousness, and “future vision of health”. Our coming “House Vision Exhibition of 2013 in Tokyo” is glad to visualize the above value and vision through more than 10 types of houses.
I wish to eliminate the limitation of industry and build up a booth, in the B to B event, for both people from different industries and architects and designers to compete with each other on creativity in the same field. Visualize the “future house” in the following exhibition with the form to be confirmed. We try to demolish the “high walls” obstructing companies of different industries and R&D “future-style house” and expect to see what on earth we can achieve.
As a designer, I am still interested in design products expressing my ideas. But it is also exciting for me to design houses endued with ‘invisible’ vision or our ‘future’ by combining with comprehensive high technologies and wisdom of talents from various industries. This is why I organized a sequence of events which visualize the “invisible” vision, such as “RE DESIGN” in 2000, “HAPTIC” in2004, “SENSEWARE” in 2007 and 2009, and “JAPAN CAR” in 2009. Our “House Vision Exhibition” will be one of these, but much larger than those in the past in terms of its size.
We have visited and discussed with many business leaders. Our “House Vision” is the achievement of such conversation. We try to communicate with as many business leaders (including from industries other than housing industry) as possible and introject their opinions, which, I believe, would lead to our new start. Therefore, “House Vision” is endued with future vision rather than traditional mission of housing industry.
In this sense, the press conference on 20th June in 2012 was a significant meeting where many leaders of housing industry participated in. I had exchanged opinions for many times by then with persons, like Mr. Yoshiaki Fujimori (president of LIXIL Corporation), Mr. Masaaki Kanai (president of Ryohin Keikaku Corporation) and Mr. Muneaki Masuda (president and CEO of Culture Convenience Club). I strongly believe those discussions would open a new door for our better future and attract more and more people with innovation. During the press conference, the leaders were eager to collectively R&D “new-style house”. Their aspiration gives me strong impression.