Designing Design, in detail
Kenya Hara is one of Japan's most respected graphic designers, best known for his long association with Muji, and Designing Design is his attempt to articulate what design actually is — and, more specifically, what distinguishes a distinctly Japanese approach from the Western design tradition. The book is not a manual or a career guide. It is a philosophical argument organized around a series of concepts and case studies, illustrated with the spare, paper-white layouts that characterize Hara's own practice.
The central concept is "emptiness" — mu in Japanese. Hara distinguishes between fullness as a communicative strategy (fill the space with messages, information, color) and emptiness as an invitation. A white page invites projection. Muji products, with their deliberate absence of logos and aggressive branding, create a space into which the user projects their own meaning. This is not nothing. Hara argues that emptiness is a positive quality, actively designed, requiring more skill and confidence than decoration. He contrasts it with the Western tendency to fill space as though blankness were a problem to solve.
The book covers several major design projects, including Hara's direction of the Nagano Winter Olympics identity in 1998 and various Muji campaigns. The analysis of the Olympics work is particularly rich: Hara explains how the visual language was designed to evoke traditional Japanese materials — washi paper, wood, snow — without turning into nostalgia or pastiche. The challenge was to be distinctly Japanese in a way that was also universally legible. This balance — local yet readable globally — runs through several chapters as a design problem worth sustained attention.
Hara also writes about what he calls "exformation" — the deliberate strategy of not fully explaining, leaving some information outside the frame so the audience must engage. Where most design tries to communicate everything, exformation designs around a productive gap. The concept is paired with his interest in vision and perception, and there are chapters on how the senses beyond sight can be engaged by design — texture, temperature, sound, smell. These sections read as a critique of a design culture that has narrowed to the visual and the digital.
The book is visually striking in any printed edition, though the arguments are available even without the images. Hara writes with a combination of precision and modesty unusual in a designer discussing his own work. Designing Design is most useful for people who design or make things and want to think more seriously about the philosophical assumptions behind their choices.
The big ideas
- 1.
Emptiness is not absence but a positive design quality — a space that invites the viewer to project meaning rather than consuming meaning that has been pre-loaded into the design.
- 2.
Muji's success depends on deliberate non-assertion: products that make no claim for themselves create room for a personal relationship with the user.
- 3.
Exformation is the design strategy of leaving some information outside the work, creating a productive gap that requires the audience's participation to complete.
