Ken Miki: Bringing depth to design

Graphis, Sep/Oct 2001 by Saiki, Maggie Kinser

Ken Miki: Bringing Depth to Design Japan has nearly every amenity that technology can provide. Yet most people feel curiouslu empty and robbed of direct experience. How can a designer reach people, and make them feel whole again? With thoughtful, literal and often tactile work, Ken Miki leads them back to earth.

In an ancient Japanese fable, the sun and the wind hold a contest to prove which is more powerful. Below them walks a man wearing a coat. Whoever convinces him to remove it will be the victor. The wind blusters and blows. Shunning the wind, the man pulls his coat closer to himself. The sun simply shines, and the man happily sheds his extra layer. Putting ourselves in the man's place, we recognize that he is not simply warm or cold, but is reacting emotionally to the methods used on him; no doubt he grimaces against the force used by the wind. Ken Miki is an Osaka-based designer in his mid-40s who works like the sun in this fable: compassionately. He invites us to participate in and enjoy the thinking process. He makes it a pleasure to join him in the dialogue, to follow him down the path to his insights, and to smile. When we search his work for meaning, we do not find ourselves in a maze constructed to challenge our convictions; we are standing on a plateau, arm in arm with the designer, enjoying the view. We warm up, remove our coats and prepare to stay a while.

Although design should not be a battle cry, the design in Japan today tends to be combative rather than inviting, colder when it could be warm. It responds to the tight weave of Japanese society and its culture, which expects of every individual loyalty to a group before loyalty to his own instincts and values. Communication through design in Japan often leans toward one of two extremes: It can be minimal, sophisticated and self-referential, something like the tea ceremony and similar prescribed cultural acts, or it can be coarse and unbound by culture, crass in its generalized statements, regardless of our diversity. Finding a friendly middle ground, in which communication via dialogue is unrestricted by the culture of a group, is a challenge for every designer in Japan. Miki, who founded his studio in 1982 at the age of 27, has continually found work through which to declare his belief in the strength of the individual, in personal experiences and insights, and in the power and necessity of cultural individualism, or ethnicity.

Ken Miki grew up in the city of Kobe and spent his childhood, like most post-war kids, playing marbles on the ground at the local Shinto shrine and making things out of found materials. His mother was a seamstress and his father ran a shop selling children's goods, both contributing to Miki's interest in objects, materials and crafts. In Japan, however, what your grandparents do is at least as important as what your parents do; it's where you came from. So on his father's advice, Miki spent the summer between fifth and sixth grade at his grandparents' salt farm, preparing a presentation on "old-fashioned" sea-salt production. This experience awakened in Miki a lasting curiosity about process and a deep respect for genuine labor, indigenous craft, and ethnicity. He has translated this curiosity into design founded on a genuine distinction between the image of a thing and the thing itself, between an imagined experience and the experience itself He insists on a physical aspect that will stimulate the audience to recognize this distinction, often working in the third dimension.

Miki discovered topographic maps while in grade school. With a pair of scissors, he traced two-dimensional maps into old cardboard boxes, and constructed his own landscapes. Much of his three-dimensional work today stems from his understanding of the meaning inherent in this 2-D to 3-D transformation. Miki uses each dimension to deliver the appropriate message. For example, on the dust jacket for Applied Typography 5, the ancient hieroglyph for 'letter' is camouflaged in the hues and dots of a test chart for color blindness. Remove one layer (the dust jacket) and you find the 'letter' two colors removed, but one dimension closer; on the hard cover, it is embossed in white on white. In another project for ABE Survey's corporate identity and brochure, Miki built mountains out of the company's name and explained its operations by making the brochure a picture book, describing in illustrations, not words, the measurements of civilization: such as the speed of running water, the numbers of cars on the roads, the decibel levels of trains. Miki's instinct for the appropriate physical expression appeals to the Japanese today because, even though Japan has accepted digital technology and virtual reality more readily than any other developed nation, half of its population can still recall the days of salt farming-the thoroughly analog world of post-war privation and a sense of wonder with the first consciously-- designed objects. Supersonic post-war growth eventually produced the economic bubble of the 1980s, a glut of money and things, and some deep psychological needs.