2010

This year, for the third time at Nakajima Noen, I was given the task of approaching the essence of the exhibition. It was in 2009, before the Lehman Shock, that I was appointed by Mr. Takashi Kanome as the director of the “Exhibition of Young Package Designers Working in Corporations”.
In the summer of that year, when I first became intensely aware of the “guerrilla downpour” that has now become an annual occurrence, I felt a strong sense of anxiety about this natural phenomenon that had struck our seemingly peaceful days. This vague sense of unease was the background for the key phrase “low-level stable society. It was a rather vague concept because it was not based on an elaborate theory, but the Lehman Shock that immediately followed, and the social and economic upheaval it triggered, began to shake society to its core, and as the economic foundation that had seemed so solid became unstable, this term began to have a mysterious power.
Some of our colleagues began to lose their jobs as a result of corporate self-preservation. We who belong to a company are somewhat protected, but we can no longer ignore the question of whether or not we should just keep on creating as we have in the past. We must face the reality that we make our living by bringing profits to companies through design and creative activities, and ask ourselves “What is the purpose of design? What is happiness? The first exhibition at Nakashima Noen, entitled “Package Koufukuron: Designing for a Low-Level Stable Society,” was an attempt to address these questions.
The exhibition featured a fictitious product, Nakashima Noen's pesticide-free brown rice. As the phrase “we eat by design” indicates, “food” is closely linked to living in society. As society becomes more and more unstable, it is natural to think first and foremost about the stability of “food. In the coming unstable society, will our staple food, “rice,” be safe? The reason I continue to use the term “Nakajima Farm” is because I feel the need to become more conscious of the rice and food that we have been consuming without being aware of it.
Although the exhibition received a great response, it did not necessarily produce a positive answer to the question of how to construct a relationship between “design” and “society in the future. In addition, the second exhibition of Package Koufukuron held last year, “Jeekeppa! exhibition held last year may have blurred the issue itself.
For the third exhibition, we have gone back to the basics and asked ourselves, “What is the meaning of ‘design’ in the future society? What is the value of creativity? I would like to search once again for answers to these questions. Even if there is no clear-cut answer, I hope to express this movement to find an answer somehow, sincerely, in the exhibition.
At the root of the Nakajima Farm series is a proposal to “try to depict tomorrow's society based on the keyword ”Package Koufukuron. We hope to share this idea once again with the participating designers and everyone who comes to the exhibition.

［Designers]
　Sumiko Matsuda (Nakatsuka Advertising Office) x Takashi Matsui (POLA) x Kenichi Tanaka (KOSÉ)
　Naoko Akai (KOSÉ) x Itsuro Yumoto (Kao) x Hiroyuki Ishiura (Suntory)
　Yuki Sugiyama (Hakuhodo) x Kazushige Oue (Kanome Design) x Masahiko Kimura (GK)
　Mayumi Kondo (GK) x Taiki Inoue (Sony) x Shigeru Yamazaki (Kose)
　Yuka Nagasaki (Shiseido) x Kenichi Hirose (Sony) x Taishi Ono (POLA)

　Kaori Kondo (Shiseido) x Takashi Kagotani (Dai Nippon Printing) x Kiyoshi Ishida (underline graphic)

［News of 2010]
　Japan Airlines went into de facto bankruptcy.
　Hayabusa returns to Earth.
　The Tohoku Shinkansen bullet train line opens to traffic.