Yoshita Handi-Design Studio Pop up
Thursday 22nd October
This October, tokyobike London is delighted to welcome Yoshita Handi-Design Studio (ヨシタ手工業デザイン室) for a special pop-up, with founder Moritaka Yoshita joining us in person from Tokyo. As part of this visit, he'll be sharing the stories behind his designs at an intimate talk on Thursday 22nd October, 6:30pm from the tools he crafts by hand to the twenty-two years he spent working alongside Sori Yanagi.
Who is Moritaka Yoshita?
Born in 1965 in Ishikawa Prefecture, Yoshita studied industrial design before joining the Yanagi Industrial Design Research Institute in 1988, working directly under Sori Yanagi, designer of the Butterfly Stool and the stainless steel kettle now held in the permanent collections of MoMA and the V&A. There, he learned that good design begins with the hand, not the sketchbook.
In 2011, the year Yanagi passed away, Yoshita founded his own studio in Koganei City, Tokyo. Its name, Shukougyou (手工業), "hand-industry," says it all: objects are better when you feel your way to them.
A Philosophy Learned by Hand
Yoshita has carried Yanagi's ideas forward while making them entirely his own, leaning into material honesty and craft, from a bottle opener that sits perfectly in the palm to kitchen tools designed to disappear into daily use.
Prototyping happens by hand, models tested and revised again and again, a slow process, deliberately at odds with trend-driven design. It's the same thread that connects Yoshita's outlook to tokyobike's own: good design isn't about noise, but about objects made to last.
This is also the thread that connects Yoshita Design to tokyobike's own outlook,a shared belief that good design isn't about noise or novelty, but about objects, and experiences, made to be genuinely useful and to last.
