Yoshita Handi-Design Studio Pop up
Thursday 22nd October, 6:30 - 8pm
Join us for an evening with Yoshita Handi-Design Studio (ヨシタ手工業デザイン室). Founder Moritaka Yoshita travels from Tokyo to share stories from his craft, including the twenty-two years he spent working alongside Sori Yanagi.
Writer, creative director, and co-founder of the Sori Yanagi Appreciation Society, Duncan Riches, will join him in conversation about his working life and his time at the Yanagi Office.
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 the concept for tokyobike: good design is about objects made to last and products that blend seamlessly into everyday life.
