For years Ruri Noguchi’s career has been revolving around marketing & product design planning, city planning consultation and product development consultation for local Industries. She currently serves as the honorary adviser of GK Design Group and is a member of Japan Industrial Design Association (JIDA). Graduated from former Tokyo University of the Arts in 1957, Ruri Noguchi was one of the founding members of GK Design Group established in 1955, where she also served as former President and Vice Chairman. She also serves as board members and juries for many design projects and events, including the members of advisory committee for several design promotion projects under government supports including MITI and Ministry of Construction, board member and panelist of ICSID ’73 Kyoto and ’89 Nagoya, member of master plan for EXPO ’70 Osaka and 85’ Tsukuba, and jury of Good Design Award for MITI, etc. She is author of Design Development for Local Industry, Kitchen Space-ology.
Established in l957 based on industrial design, today GK Design Group is practicing a comprehensive approach with multi-disciplinary realms of design such as product, graphics, transportation, architectural and urban planning, under organic formulation of activities.
Developed countries’ economic and industrial activities have brought critical condition of global environment in unprecedented scale. In this times of world’s socio-econo drastic change, yet many issues are stark reality. There lie in the issues the design profession should tackle.
Although civilization characterized by standardization exerting the power of universality, by contrast culture is a distinctive existence in tremendous diversity supported by indigenous environment, races and religion including time and space. To see the diversity for design practice we need some way of communication. Among many ways of communication, I believe that “adaptation” is a way telling a new idea. This is the age needed a proposal to find an objective and an approach of design from Asia with culture and civilization different from that of the West.
In the session, I would like to explore the role and approach of design for a new era to come by presenting GK’s works as a case study with the key word “adaptation.”
