{"id":14415,"date":"2013-06-25T14:30:39","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T12:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/?p=14415"},"modified":"2019-04-30T18:52:41","modified_gmt":"2019-04-30T16:52:41","slug":"rude-vc-shiro-kuramata","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/2013\/06\/rude-vc-shiro-kuramata\/","title":{"rendered":"Rude VC: Tech Designers – Hurry over to London by July 10"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"glass-chair\"<\/a>No, this is not an encouragement to would-be fiscal exiles or pigeons<\/a>. Nor do I have any specific conference or startup networking event in mind as I write this. In fact, the reason has nothing to do with tech, at least not in a directly obvious way.<\/p>\n

It’s about an art exhibition. Specifically, Shiro Kuramata, the exhibition<\/em>, which is hosted by The Aram Gallery<\/a> in London until July 10.<\/p>\n

Shiro Kuramata was one of Japan’s most radical designers of furniture and interiors of the 20th century (Kuramata-san died in 1991). He belonged to a generation of innovators that came of age in post-war Japan, with friends and contemporaries like architects Tadao Ando, Arata Isozaki, and Yoshio Taniguchi; graphic artists Ikko Tanaka and Tadanori Yokoo; and fashion designers Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, and Yohji Yamamoto. Design afficionados describe Kuramata’s work as ‘minimalist’, while ‘combining the Japanese notion of the arts as one single continuum with a fascination of modern Western culture’.<\/p>\n

Lovely, but what does this have to do with my startup ?<\/h4>\n

Potentially, a lot. The startups that gain the most traction, particularly consumer-facing ones, are those that excel in product design. I’ve previously written about Japan’s new class<\/a> of rising tech startups, which espouse the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi in their creations, and how design is an essential ingredient in Silicon Valley’s secret sauce<\/a>, forming the heart of a product’s user experience.<\/p>\n

Writer Leonard Koren, in Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers<\/em>, while paying homage to Kuramata explains how wabi-sabi celebrates “earthiness, chance, unpretentiousness and intimacy of scale. It isn’t about perfection, slickness, or mass production… [its] simplicity is a state of grace arrived at… by an economy of means.”<\/p>\n

Visionary startups craft products whose user interfaces are clean and unencumbered, with functionality pared down to the essence.<\/p>\n

In a future post I’ll write about two French startups whose aptitude for design attracted me to use their respective products almost every day.<\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, this is not an encouragement to would-be fiscal exiles or pigeons. Nor do I have any specific conference or startup networking event in mind as I write this. In fact, the reason has nothing to do with tech, at least not in a directly obvious way. It’s about an art exhibition. Specifically, Shiro Kuramata,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":14419,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-finance"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14415\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}