The Significance of the NEXTMARUNI PROJECT
- Dialogue with Japanese Culture

1. A society of diversity

The trend throughout the twentieth century was in the direction of a world of ever greater uniformity. This meant of course that there was a prevalent mood of rejecting everything that was different. There was no end to the struggles between the dominating and the dominated, struggles that played themselves out between different histories, different peoples and different religions. The fact that this historical record sets before us is that the trend toward uniformity gives rise ironically to yet further strife and discord. Under no circumstances can it possibly make any contribution to the development and growth of humanity.
It is said that if one attempts to exclude a heterogeneous element from a pack of animals, another heterogeneous element will appear once again from within the remaining homogenous pack. Diversity has been incorporated into our world from the outset as an ingenious means for assuring the growth and renovation of the species. Nature incorporates heterogeneity as part of its very essence and has maintained its robust health by constantly preserving its diversity.
The 21st century is set to be a century when we learn once again to accept diversity and discover new frameworks for coexistence in a spirit of diversity.
One of our main priorities at present is therefore to exercise our ingenuity in creating an era in which our society can maintain a dynamic sense of order as a complex organization in which diverse individualities and diverse cultures are able to exist side by side.

2. The meaning of diversity

A diverse and dynamic society is not merely a society in which a variety of heterogeneous elements coexist. It is one which comes into being as a totality of relationships in which heterogeneous elements are able to stimulate one another, are creatively interlinked, and contribute to one another's growth. True creativity denotes a situation in which individual people are stimulated by other differing entities and declare to the world at large their individual natures, which continue thus to be animated and fostered. Put quite simply, creative activity is a form of exchange which comes into being as a type of two-way invigoration involving the other.
But, at the same time, creative activity is not just a reciprocal affair. For instance, the ideas and images conveyed by a work of art are not conveyed to the recipient in accordance with the intentions of the artist. The recipient, that is to say the "other" to whom the artist's message is conveyed, will inevitably read this message through the filter of his own ideas and experience. What occurs here, therefore, is that the artist's message is recreated by the recipient as he deciphers it. Viewing the essence of the creative activity of an artist from a broad perspective, one can say that the recipient is clearly involved in the artist's creative process.
A diverse society is a society which continues to be created in a multi-layered manner by people with differing attributes and by people and peoples possessing different cultures. This mechanism makes itself felt not just in art but also in terms of everyday behavior and assertions.
Social diversity is not just a matter of heterogeneous elements sticking together to a form a static gel-like entity: it involves a chain of creativity in which these elements interact and influence one another. This is a dynamic and highly fused condition in which harmony is maintained while there is always the latent opportunity to move to a new form of order.

3. Dialogue with Japanese culture

The "dialogue with Japanese culture" involved in the NEXTMARUNI PROJECT is all about transferring the experience of a creative chain linking heterogeneous cultures to the design of small chairs. Our aim is to express our message involving the Japanese aesthetic by means of small chairs and to realize a space in which they are gathered together in one place to enter into a dialogue with Japanese culture.
This is a kind of experiment through the medium of design aimed at realizing the grand vision represented by the orientation toward diversity. Diverse individuals with varied roots depict their own respective small chairs as a message directed to the Japanese aesthetic.With the spread of globalization throughout the world, diverse individuals from different regions and races and with different religions have begun to search for methods of coexistence on a global scale. We have planned this project as an experiment aimed at encouraging a clear awareness of this global trend and at inducing a bolder approach to this matter. The project has most definitely not been conceived as a way of getting designers from all over the world to incorporate and share the Japanese aesthetic. We have no idea of what is likely to arise from the encounter between the Japanese aesthetic and the varied personalities of the individual designers conceived as the cultural "other". The "dialogue with Japanese culture" is all about getting designers to express these brand new conceptions in the form of small chairs.