Japanese Wisdom Used in Design

(And Life in General)

In one of my previous articles I talked about wabi-sabi, the Japanese concept that embraces all things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

Last week, I bookmarked an article that talked about the Japanese concept of space and how it focuses on the relationships among people in this space. At least four different words describe space in Japanese: Relational space (wa), Knowledge-mobilizing space (ba), Location (tokoro), and Negative space (ma). If you’re as intrigued by this as I was, you can nerd out reading the full article here.

Last but not least, I stumbled across something interesting in one of Ingrid Fetell Lee‘s blog posts on her website The Aesthetics of Joy (I highly recommend checking it out!). She talks about the Japanese joy of everyday things: zakka. It describes objects that have a decorative as well as a functional value. Those are my kind of things :)

“If you make good choices of the objects you surround yourself with, they will pay you back with joy.”

Like Marie Kondo always says, if an object doesn’t bring you joy, thank it for its services and let it go. And with this, I wish you a colourful and zen-like day!