Ishikawa has an ordinary English name that no one doesn't know, tom in Tom and Jerry. But there's a playful way of thinking about it in this common name, and from his point of view, the name Tom is very similar to his Chinese name, at least it's written.
The 31-year-old Ishikawa won the uk's d&ad world's only award and the first prize of the product, and was selected by the BRITISH design week as one of the top 50 hot people who changed the face of design that year, and later returned to China, he led Ishikawa Design Research Firm and Lipin Brand Planning to continue to explore the field of design, known as China's avant-garde designers.
Before the visit, I wanted to ensure that everything was foolproof, so I asked the design editor how to talk to the designer, and replied, "The more senior, the less shelf." Sure enough, he replied appropriately, "Okay, ok, I'll check the schedule."
Ishikawa's studio is located in Guangzhou's Dongfanghong Creative Park, formerly known as the Dongfanghong Printing Factory, in addition to the flat-roofed gate and the big red logo on it, the brick houses and tree-lined roads inside are shrouded in an atmosphere of escape from busyness. Commercialization is not heavy, more design studios, sparse people on the road.
Walk through an alley and see someone setting off a drone. When I came to a front wall composed of grid glass, I knew that I had arrived at the office planned by the Lipin brand. A huge orange Trojan horse appeared through the glass. When I saw him, I sure enough, I had a square chin like a cartoon character in the picture. The eyes were sharp, the voice was gentle with the southerners, and as soon as I entered, I was allowed to sit in the courtyard next to the studio, and the birds were crying. He asked hr to pour a large cup of tea and open the conversation box as usual.
Ishikawa graduated from Guangmei in 1998, when the Pearl River Delta home appliance companies were in an explosive growth, and there were no less than 3,000 home appliance sellers in Guangzhou alone. He designs for Tong Huiming's business. The latter was then a professor of design art in Guangmei. In the professor's eyes, the characteristics of the small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises in that era were: they copied and imitated other people's products with righteousness.
Speaking of which, from 1998 to 2003, Tong Huiming designed four types of electric water heaters alone, and there were also four series of disinfection cabinets. In the past 5 years, Ishikawa, who has just entered the society, found that several water heaters and disinfection cabinets are made every year.
The so-called four kinds of electric water heaters, each with a different prefix: Wanhe brand, Wanjiale brand, Wanhe brand strong brand gas and Wanhe brand gas, and the four series of disinfection cabinets, simply fully transparent, hanging, high-grade vertical, embedded, small habit feel that it sounds like there is not even a room for excitement.
Tong Huiming once proposed the "three-year itch" for students working in enterprises, believing that students should re-evaluate them after three years of entering the enterprise, and if they find that the enterprise cannot give themselves more room for development, they should consider changing places.
Ishikawa chose to leave. He often looked at foreign design yearbooks and couldn't help but wonder: Under what circumstances was such an outstanding thing conceived? How did they achieve this constant high quality of some designs?
He was full of doubts to solve this problem, and after a year of deliberation, in 2003, this young designer named Tom Shi packed his bags and went to central Saint Martins Art Institute in the United Kingdom to study: a master's degree in industrial design, which also made him famous in Chinese design circles.
This is a product concept designed by Ishikawa in the United Kingdom, and the outer packaging is a bone-shaped filling sprayer made of silicone material, which is called "dog poo spray". Insert it into the dog feces, spray liquid, it can quickly harden the puppy's feces through chemical action, easy to pick up, prevent mosquito bacteria from breeding at the same time, but also on its surface to produce a warning color to remind passers-by.
Ten years later, talking about its original intention, Ishikawa laughed. "The streets of England are basically full of dogs", and this is the case with is the neighborhood where Ishikawa lives. Fresh dog feces are hot and inconvenient to clean up, which will damage the community environment over time. The issue was a concern for the government, and although a prohibition decree was issued, with fines of up to 1,000 pounds, it had little effect.
It happened that Ishikawa was doing his graduation project at St. Martin, and he was forced by his tutor to choke enough every week, and he was extremely bored. He and his other Chinese classmates plan to participate in a D&AD design competition to adjust the hardships of life. First of all, the pain point of the dog poop needs to be solved, and then the Ishikawa team has loved to watch Dr. Aq Day manga since childhood, and the classic image of the protagonist Ala Lei holding the is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and the source of the design seems to be clear.
[Note: Alare loves ice cream, but Dr. Aq only pays for one ice cream a day, so she plays with a stick to relieve her hunger.] ]
Why can it stand up? Ishikawa thought of the characteristics of dog dung and felt that it had to be made into a lump.
With Lenovo, the team began to dig up data from the network and the market, and finally found a solution from the building tinkers and rapid freezers on the market, and within two weeks, the concept of dog poo spray was born.
"I had two problems, one was to solve the package, and the other was to solidify it, and with this need I went to look for solidion according to it. Even if it's not within my area of expertise, I can try to understand it," Ishikawa explains.
This dog poo spray won ishikawa's team the first prize of the 2005 British d&ad Design of the Year award and the "Product Design Individual Award".
At this point, the doubts in my mind two years ago seem to have been solved. "I went with those questions, what is originality, where does the originality come from, and when I actually studied it in the UK, I found that this is all a false proposition. Everything is closely related to the way we live, the things we care about."
It was around this time that all three members of the Ishikawa team were selected by Design Week as one of the top 50 hits who changed the face of design in 2005. At that time, there was a sentence in the article: "It is not difficult to imagine from the level of innovative thinking displayed by these three young designers that in the near future China will develop into an important force in the design world, just like their manufacturing industry."
Ishikawa's understanding of innovative thinking is "not following the rules and not being satisfied with the status quo".
Although it was such an interesting and practical design, the dog poop spray was not put into production. As a consumer public welfare green product, one of its characteristics is that it has economic externalities, and consumers are not only paying for the product, but also paying for the public.
Ishikawa believes that its cost and cost do not match the value acceptable to the commercial market, if the average person can use tape to glue dog feces, why spend a lot of money to buy dog poop spray? Therefore, the judgment that there is not much commercial space was made. He concludes that "in the business world, everything exists for a reason that is constrained by many things."
However, in 2008, Ishikawa, who had been back for two years, faced the situation that he had to put the public welfare design into production.
After the Wenchuan earthquake, disaster relief activities in society have risen one after another. Ishikawa thought: From a designer's point of view, what can we do? Looking back at that year, after a wave of donations, many victims were forced to transfer to the temporary resettlement site of the 900 square board house, teachers and students faced a cold winter, the temperature is estimated to be as low as minus ten degrees, Ishikawa and NGO's friends after communication, found that the victims are not short of winter clothing, but if you can give them a handbag...
(Note: Made of polymer plastic, the jacket is embroidered with the outline of the hand, just in the posture of holding the hand warmer bag with both hands.) Built-in temperature control device, charging for 10 minutes, reaching 70 degrees of water temperature will automatically cut off the power. ）
All designs come at a cost, and is the question of how to find someone to pay for the public good? Where are the demand points combined?
When he thought, "Girls in winter, especially girls now, they like to hold a hand warmer bag by one person." , this combination point is found. 1100 pairs of heart-shaped hand warmers were sold to the public in pairs for about 90 yuan, one for their own use, and one for the disaster area. The latter is a nine-year school in Longmenshan Town, Pengzhou City, Sichuan Province, with 74 teachers and 973 students.
The carrier of the warm water bag may be bland in the production sense, but its special feature is that Ishikawa understands the real needs of the victims, and finds the common needs of the affected teachers and students and urban white-collar workers, and uses creative thinking sales methods to make it land.
You might think that disaster relief design after an earthquake will naturally have a complete answer (what's so great?). ）。 Then the next green craft design takes place on a more fortuitous day.
The "Divine Horse" is a rocking wooden horse transformed from a collected discarded beverage bottle, which uses the principle of dense average force to combine plastic bottles on wooden horses. The main part of the Trojan is finely ground solid wood, and the bottom is equipped with 23 holes, which can be used with most of the drinking water bottles on the market for children aged 2-10 years old.
Many discarded plastic bottles on the market have been upgraded into lamps and flower pots, but how many can be as cute as the god horse?
At that time, Ishikawa had just become a father, and wanted to make a green design for disposable beverage bottles to extend the vitality of bottles that others had drunk, and Shenma was one of them.
Ishikawa can still recall that when he came out of the studio where he was playing boards, he only had to cross a short road to get home, and Ishikawa, who was holding the first "god horse", suddenly noticed something. The curious eyes of the children, aunts, and aunts on the side of the road surrounded it, "This is very interesting", "That thing"... The way home is only a few tens of meters and it is very uncomfortable.
At the instigation of friends, Ishikawa and his wife opened the Sacred Horse Exhibition, producing hundreds of Sacred Horses in small batches, with a unit price of five or six hundred, basically sold out.
"We're just the piece of wood that sells it, hoping to create an opportunity for action." After buying it back, parents and children go together to collect bottles, assemble, decorate and beautify it, and it will become a part of life." Some buyers, even without children, are willing to place the sacred horse as an icon in the study living room, which is inseparable from its refinement and philosophy: practicing green life in the most natural and interesting way.
This is similar to the speech of Kazuo Tanaka, president of Japan's gk design group, at the Shanghai gift show a few days ago: when more and more elements are added to design works, the complexity of appearances is no longer the focus of design, and the internal relationship with people and life becomes the driving force for design to return to basics.
Because of the audience's love for shenma, the entire exhibition was packaged to shenzhen, Nanjing and other places to tour the exhibition, that is, in 2011. In 2014, Shenma opened a pop-up shop at the Guangzhou International Congress for three months as a virtual brand selling coffee, utensils, cakes and snacks.
"Most of the general environmentally friendly recycled products in the market are like the work of students, and it is impossible for people who are accustomed to modern life to give up these benefits for the sake of environmental protection. I don't think of environmental protection as a performance art, but I hope to turn it into a new thinking in the consumption pattern and achieve the role of civic education." Ishikawa once said this.
The lesson he learned was, "Starting from a very small, interesting point, making it into a system, people will look at it from a completely different perspective." Asked if he was worried about not getting his money back, Ishikawa smiled, "I've never lost money."
In the above three designs, Ishikawa continues to use experimental research and products to define the scope of innovative thinking, confirming its effectiveness in public welfare design. In addition to Wenchuan hand warmers, their goal is more to the dissemination of ideas than to the landing of products, and the emphasis in the practice process is the accumulation of experience and resources.
At the end of last year, Ishikawa came for real. Four years ago, he and four post-70s designers gathered to form the "Seven+5 Public Welfare Design Organization". At the end of last year, the five people designed a series of creative public toilet concepts, pointing to the pain points of "urban public toilets", and invited social organizations, people's congress representatives and relevant regional units to participate in the Guangzhou Design Week Urban Public Toilet Design Exhibition. Ishikawa is responsible for the concept of "shooting bar" in the men's toilet that avoids ground urine.
Visual seduction: The illusion of vision induces people to take a small step forward and aim at the urinal.
Yiqu News: Use interesting and meaningful signs to guide people forward to the urinal.
Psychological cues: Take advantage of people's obsessive-compulsive disorder, curiosity, and compassion to not get close to the point of not being happy.
Physical interaction: set limits, blend into the situation, absolute safety distance.
Ishikawa designed the concept of "shooting bar" for men's toilets, and some people asked "what about women's toilets"?
With the team's resources and experience, Ishikawa hopes to integrate a complete set from the team series design, effectively cooperate with the relevant stakeholders and start to implement, which is also the goal of Seven+5 this year.
From the "shoot it" pee to the dog poop spray design that was born more than a decade ago, Ishikawa has been looking for the landing point of public welfare design in interesting ways outside of business.
The question in the interview was first of all how the public welfare could recover the cost, and finally found that this was also a false proposition. Ishikawa interprets this from a different perspective entirely:
"Designers' way of thinking can play a role in many other ways than business, embodying value. It can be said that we have an immortal heart, and we hope to do some things and research by ourselves, which is also to constantly try, cross, challenge the original boundaries, and find a value of our own."