Objectified -from one of different cultural eyes-

I watched “objectified” at Amazon. Every design has stories. Design should be innovative, make a product useful, aesthetic design, long-lived, and environmentally friendly. One Japanese designer appeared in the movie. Naoto Fukazawa who is a designer for a Japanese retail company which sells wide variety of household and consumer goods, Muji.

I am a little worried about weather other countries people can understand what he wanted to tell, because his talking about designs strongly takes a peculiar Japanese way and cultural elements. Haiku influenced Naoto Fukazawa’s design a lot. Haiku is a fixed verse form of seventeen syllables arranged in a five-seven-five pattern. One of the characteristics of Haiku is its artistic brevity. Haiku gives an objective, fleeting picture of its subject in simple words. Japanese like simple, frugal, and calm. We like quickly sensing beauty what does it means by an object or a visual scene just in front of you.

I pick up an Aquafina’s plastic bottle and “ILOHAS plastic bottle” for this research. One day, I and one my American friend went to a supermarket together, and we took this plastic bottle. My friend said, “ Oh! This is a very bad quality plastic bottle, it’s too soft and light!” I tried to touch it, and I realized and said, “No, this is actually good and environmental friendly. You can crush this bottle after drinking so it’s gonna be very small thing when you throw this away."

Why I realized this thing? Because, Aquarina’s plastic bottle looked same as a Japanese water brand, ILOHAS. Recently, I am feeling American people also start to get an interest in sustainability these days. Recycling, environmentally friendly, and sustainability are long-lived interests for Japanese because of our small country.

ILOHAS became the number one brand in water brands only in 6 months in Japan in 2009. Ecology has becoming "growing concern" in Japan where people are getting sensitive to ecological matters such as "waste" and "CO2 emission" day by day. The ILOHAS ad has gotten into the Japanese consumers’ growing desire to contribute to solving environmental problems through convincing them that they would make a meaningful contribution to the natural environment. The ILOHAS’ new created pet package which is described as “40% reduction in the PET package weight, we made the smallest label we could, we planned sources of the water from a places close to the plant to further reduce CO2 emission from transport.” The second ad shows ILOHAS’ ultra-light crushable plastic pet bottle and it shows that a consumer can crush the lightest and softest plastic pet bottle by her or himself. The ad shows how it is easier to crush the pet bottles than other plastic bottles. “Aquafina” is almost same. They succeed 50% less plastic on the bottle.

I can conclude that the ILOHAS and Aquafina makes use of the emotion of consumer’s desire to involve environmental friendly. Those products allude that if a consumer buys this new packaging water, he or she will take part in the environmental action.

LOGOs for Project #1

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Sample for a packaging design of rosemary.

I will change the brand name of O organics to "Organics me" or just "Organics".

Mood Board #1

    
O Organics Mood Board By ASKA













O ORGANICS: Quality and great taste the way nature intended!

The O ORGANICS I am going to redesign is great tasting organic foods, beverages, and ingredients should be available to everyone and sold everywhere at a great value. 

The Three Structures are:
1)Jar 2)Carton 3)sack or can (not decided yet)

The products that I will be working with are: 
1)Herbs and seasonings  2)Tea bags 3)coffee beans 

My goals for the new packing designs:
- rename the brand name

- using a drawing of leaf or a vegetable as a part of the new logo

- using more natural color　(maybe fade colors...?)

- changing font face



Tea leaves - Green tea, Green tea with lemon, Green tea with peach