"+S" CONSTELLATION CARD (2001)
Client: Wacoal Art Center Co., Ltd.
This was the first product Takahashi created after Spiral Market contacted her about establishing a collaborative original brand.
Their request was for Takahashi to design, freely, an item that would add something inspiring to people's everyday lives. Because it was an opportunity to create something "freely," Takahashi decided to challenge and redress some past "over-interventions" of designers which, in her opinion, were causing problems.
The result was this CONSTELLATION CARD, a tool to create constellations.
This was a set of six cards, bearing a total of 12 constellations, one on each side. They were designed with holes that were common to all 12 constellations, with no unnecessary holes, and when placed over the card with a colorful, amoeba-like illustration, it revealed a constellation. Takahashi invented this card in order to encourage people to recapture the practice of forming thoughts from the root of things.
"In the contemporary world, aren't people fed with images and thoughts so much that they are no longer capable of creating things?" Takahashi asked of herself, and designed the cards.
Depictions of the Swan constellation, for example, if designed for children, often include a cute drawing of a swan surrounding the dots representing the stars. Or they might come with a gorgeous painting of a swan, though which designers over-feed people images, causing them to rely on others to create or imagine things for them―that was the starting point of Takahashi's work on this project.
Her first step to change this trend was to encourage others to restore their ability to imagine by dismantling, as naturally as possible, the images that have been fed from outside. The second step was to support people in restoring their natural creativity by giving them opportunities to think about how things work, such as constellations and other things which operate using some kind of mechanism, and by experiencing success, such as being able to imagine the shape of a swan through connecting dots and drawing lines on a card.
Takahashi designed the cards so that constellations are formed by the hands of the user. "Points are connected to become a line and lines are connected to become a plane" ―this realization of connections between points, lines, and planes was something that she had when she was in her teens, and it was a decisive moment in which she experienced everything in her connecting and falling into place at once.
The cards demonstrate mechanisms and ways of thinking in this world, which are all interconnected. It is also the fundamental concept behind all designs created by MASAMI DESIGN. This original product was made as a MASAMI TAKAHASHI original brand, in collaboration with Spiral Market.
This original product incorporating Takahashi's philosophies took shape because of an opportunity to "design freely," and has become a catalyst fostering people's creativity.
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