Browsing Posts published by Peter Kuchnicki
Visit the Asian Design scene here at ASIANLINE. We hope to include feeds and blogs from friends throughout this important region. Please send us your news and views to asianline @ sparkawards. com.
LETTERS FROM THE RING OF FIRE
Harrowing and heroic stories are reaching us from our Spark friends in Asia. We’ve posted several below. The first two are from Leimei Julia Chiu. Julia is the Executive Director of Japan’s Good Design Awards, and President-Elect of the ICOGRADA organization.
Julia—
I hope you and your loved ones are well. Please—when it is convenient—send Spark an update on the Japanese design community and the latest efforts regarding the calamities.
—Peter
4/15/11
Hello Peter and the Spark Community—
At times like this, one can not help feel very different perspectives about how we can reposition design so that the profession can really be of service to the weak, the poor and those in need.
It will be a long-term commitment and we will need to learn how to combine and share our expertise.
We really need to bring people from different disciplines to start thinking about how we could work together- to help communities rebuild their lives at transitional shelters and afterward.
We will need everyone to help with this huge task.
At JIDPO, we have shifted all our projects towards how design can help with community-rebuilding in the northeastern areas.
Please see: “How can designers support relief efforts in Japan?”
http://www.jidpo.or.jp/en/news/2011/0401.html
http://www.jidpo.or.jp/en/news/2011/0401_2.html
I am contacting major design awards from around the world to collect good case studies/products/services/systems that could be of use to the reconstruction efforts.
INDEX (Copenhagen), Design Forum Finland (Helsinki) will be working with us for this project as part of the collaboration and AIGA (U.S.A.) has been helping with this effort. Both are promoting design/architecture in all disciplines.
Israel Community of Designers has created a facebook page which permits designers to express solidarity:
http://www.facebook.com/designers4japan
Another idea is as follows:
I will be working with Niigata Prefecture which has also experienced an earthquake several years back. The government has a project to integrate craft industries, manufacturers and designers to develop new products each year.
Here’s the website:
http://www.nico.or.jp/hyaku/english/
This year, I will be the design manager to direct this initiative and I am thinking of setting the theme as follows: How can we design products and systems for a better living environment, where people have been displaced, and are trying to reorient themselves to build a new life from scratch?
We need ideas. The companies in Niigata will realize these ideas into real products/systems after one year.
with warmest regards
—Julia
3/17/2011
Subject: deepest gratitude from julia/ tokyo, japan
Dear everyone–
Thank you so much for all the encouragement and offer to help the design communities in Japan.
I am deeply, deeply touched and will try to answer all your messages individually.
I will stay put in Tokyo for now and try to work out some plans for how design associations in Japan can help with the long term reconstruction efforts in the areas heavily hit by the earthquake/Tsunami.
We will probably need support from the international design community. I will keep you updated as we progress with the planning.
We are having rolling blackouts in Tokyo area to cope with the energy shortage so it might take me some time to respond.
with warmest thoughts and a big, big hug from Tokyo
–julia
And we have this reflective note from teacher, reporter, Reverend and friend Jaime, currently across the Sea of Japan in Northern China
3/16/11
Jaime R. Vergara 
Special to the Saipan Tribune
Channel NewsAsia out of Singapore, along with CCTV 9 of Beijing, is following the unfolding crisis in Japan after the 9. Richter scale tremor, the strongest quake ever to shake the nation, and the subsequent tsunami that sent 10-meter-high waves 10 kilometers inland in Honshu, leaving the tarmac of the Sendai International Airport underwater, a local hospital still standing as the only refuge for some 300 persons in an area of collapsed structures, and 10,000 people from one village still remaining unaccounted for. The predictable aftershocks add damage and discomfort, but it is the threat of the nuclear meltdown of six reactors that is sending chills down everyone’s spine.
Not unlike humankind’s previous relationship to “flat earth,” which we now know to be spherical, and calling the experience of sundown as “sunset” when the earth actually turns, we never really consider land mass as floating tectonic plates on magma, but to appreciate how strong the earthquake in Japan was, the whole archipelago moved by a couple of meters and the axis of the planet itself shifted by a few centimeters!
Zen Japan is showing a remarkable face of solid calmness. News reports portray a nation intentionally going through the motions of a rehearsed drill in the midst of the surprising destruction that trails the wake of this disaster. The vaunted train system, one of the most sophisticated rails in the world that connects Kagoshima in south Kyushu to Wakkanai of north Hokkaido, shut down momentarily, along with its metro systems, at least in the urban centers of Honshu. Undaunted, people bought bicycles and pedaled home, while some just trudged and walked in the cold.
In 2002, we took a week-long retreat in late January before the cherry blossoms, taking the train from Narita to Sapporo in Hokkaido on the eastern corridor through Sendai, and returning on the western route through Akita and Niigata to West Tokyo. The cultivated and manicured countryside was a scene to behold, the tidiness of the trains and orderliness of its people a welcome respite from the hustle of crowd and mass humanity.
Although signs of juvenile vandalism-mainly graffiti-were evident in metro structures, the orderly Japan of our previous acquaintance, of nature both physical and societal disciplined into the level of art on terrain and population, was still very much and unmistakably alive! Majestic Mt. Fuji reigned as Hokusai’s rowers navigate the towering waves off Kanagawa in my sea of tranquility!
It is with deep appreciation that I recall that solitary week almost a decade ago, but as I watch today the deluge of painful unraveling that characterizes the Land of the Rising Sun, only the sound of silence is appropriate to express our profound sorrow of the innocent suffering unleashed.
A people’s tragedy, however, has awakened humanity’s empathy. Though its economy is one where its GNP far exceeds its GDP, showing barely any economic growth though ascending into international eminence, it has shown an economic arrangement where the concern for humanness matters. Japan projected a country with a human face.
Its virtues of simple elegance in cuisine and decor, lifestyle and landscape, custom and technology, its thrust toward moderation on all things in its post-WWII demeanor, has endeared it in many parts of the world; though it was saddled with the cruel memories of militarism, it also lived through the mushroom cloud brunt of Little Boy and Fat Man over the skies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The nation took this nuclear kamikaze and domesticated it for peaceful use. Now, the ice and the fire, the heat and the water, Mother Nature’s yin-yang elemental force comes calling on Nippon’s door again.
Presbyter and poet Ellie Stock wrote the following not too long ago:
What do I call what calls from the deeps,
that pulses through stars and quickens heart’s beat,
that surges through waves and cleanses with fire,
emerges from dust and breathes soul’s desire?
What do I name what mocks human pride,
that bends the tree of life, sustaining being’s tide?
It is with Zen calmness that we join Japan and the rest of the world in daring to give a name to that which emerges from the deeps, whether from the bowels of the earth, or from the deep abyss of the battered human soul.
The world joins that call of the deep as its K9s head for Tokyo to locate survivors. There is solidarity afoot in a world already grieved by the Gaddafis and the Tehrar Squares. But the ebb and flow of global reconciliation fills the air, and I, in my archaic season of Lent, smell the scent of transformation, in faith, hope and love. With T.S. Elliot and Zen calmness, I sing:
Quick now, here, now, always-
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well…
———————————————————–
BACK AT IT
Sorry folks– Not enough blogging going on around here! We’ve been consumed with an extremely busy competition season. It started getting hectic in September, with the Spark exhibition in Shanghai, during the Cumulous Design Educators Conference. 
Then, wham, we were slammed with all the pre-Spark deadline publicity–well, you probably experienced a bit of it. The Spark Jury finally convened in late October, and we all had a swell time. 
The Jury was Monday. The Awards Celebration and exhibition of winners was the following Friday. In between, all of the staff came down with a vicious bout of food poisoning. So things were a little out of sorts! Anyway we made it happen, the Spark party was fun and 2010 was a wrap.
Well, almost. For our final act, Spark Director Clark Kellogg and I went on a whirlwind tour of Korea, Taipei and Guangzhou. The Guangdong Industrial Design Association graciously invited Spark to mount an exhibition of the 2010 winners. The occasion was the GD Industrial Design Week. So this was both an honor and a pleasure. 
The GDDW Themes were Talent, Fusion, Industry and Cooperation. We were part of the Fusion Pavilion.
And the finished Pavilion glowed with your winning Sparks.
A pioneer of Chinese design, Prof. Tong Huimin, Director of the Guangzhou Academy of Art, came by to welcome us to GZ. Prof. Tong is a great friend of Spark and we always enjoy seeing him again.
A very interesting final stop on this tour brought us to the Taiwan Design Expo in Taipei. This was a show with lots of great student work, some incredible fabric and fashion design and some nifty electronics. Taiwan Design Center’s Vivian Wu and team filled us in on next October’s International Design Alliance Congress, and Spark’s contribution–hoping for something fresh and… Sparkly, please! (This show will be a doozy of a networking event. Don’t miss it.)
So ended a momentous year–and we lived through it! Back home we gave thanks, shoveled snow and rested up for the next round. All Best!
