Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization

DESIGN NEWS 258

('02.6.10)

Sports Industry and Design: From World Cup Goods to Stadiums

Design Development of D-MOLO

Designing the Urban Desert: Ayumi Han's Approach towards Public Space

Feature: Student Design Showcase 2002

The football World Cup is about to get under way in Korea and Japan. Sixty-four matches will be held over a period of a month from the preliminary matches until the final, and the eyes of the world will be enthusiastically focused on what is sure to be a thrilling tournament. This will be a historic international event featuring the sport that has become the true “king of sport.” The eyes of the world will be concentrated on Japan as one of the host nations. This will therefore be a good opportunity to change the stereotyped image of Japan, and we have every reason to expect that this tournament will indeed successfully play this role.
Design in connection with the World Cup is being applied to everything from tickets, uniforms, footballs and character goods to stadiums and football pitches under the management of footballers themselves. The original festive nature of sport has declined, with the environment in which the World Cup finds itself generating big money to create an enormous market. Under these conditions, considerable criticism is being directed toward the anonymity of design and designers and the opaque manner in which decisions on design are taken. In this article, Ichiro Sayama discusses the theme of sports industry and design of this year's football World Cup and draws attention to questions related to design management in this regard.

Major changes have occurred in offices over the past decade. Computers and networks have become increasingly common, and the first thing that most people do when they arrive at work in the morning these days is to turn on their computer and check their E-mail. Offices are essentially places for intellectual production, but the diffusion of computers and networks has brought into sharp relief matters such as the distribution of information and the production of knowledge which have hitherto remained in the dark.
The emergence of information technology has been accompanied by the new concept of the “workplace,” but furniture is no longer an essential consideration in “workplaces” freed from restrictions on time and place. The very raison d'ltre of office furniture has decreased significantly during the past ten years.
D-MOLO is intended to be a project that supports business, knowledge and knowledge workers at the forefront of the age. Our development activities began with discussions on how office furniture should support knowledge work.
In this article, Hajime Saeki, Koichi Wakasugi and Kunihide Oshinomi offer comments from their own respective positions concerning the design development of D-MOLO, which was jointly developed by the K/O Design Studio (Kunihide Oshinomi and Naoki Terada) and Uchida Yoko and was launched last December.

“Student Design Showcase 2002” presents an introduction to works by students who have recently graduated from Japanese design universities and colleges, and is edited annually by Design News. This is the tenth feature in this series, and in it we present works by students who graduated in 2002 from 37 colleges and 38 departments of design in Japan. We have also been to see “Tetsuson 2002,” an exhibition of work by 272 new graduates of 23 design and art colleges throughout Japan held at Makuhari Messe, and we report on the issues raised by the work on display there.