How do we leverage "soft" subcultural icons, obsessions, and desires into products with irresistible consumer appeal? Source: Stone Bridge Press press release
Stone Bridge Press is pleased to announce Geeky-Girly Innovation: A Japanese Subculturalist`s Guide to Technology and Design by Morinosuke Kawaguchi. This visionary book by a leading Japanese strategy expert supplies a road map for the future of international technology, design, and popular culture. Analyzing everything from super-toilets to cute character stationery goods, Kawaguchi argues here that the Japanese have leveraged the childlike, feminine, cute aspects of their otaku ("geek") culture into top-tier products for world markets. What does this mean for the human/object interface? How can we personalize and pleasurize design? The answers may lie in our entertainments, innocence, and obsessions. Morinosuke Kawaguchi is principal associate director for Arthur D. Little Japan and a lecturer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is considered the inventor of a new concept in product engineering and technology development that draws from Japanese culture. He writes regularly on these topics, creating a bridge between the hard-boiled industry and creative subculture. ISBN: 978-1-61172-002-0 Available August 15, 2012 $26.95 US 256 Pages Trade Cloth
About Stone Bridge Press
Stone Bridge Press was established in Berkeley, California, in 1989. Authors published by Stone Bridge Press include Donald Richie and Frederik L. Schodt. Stone Bridge is admired for its reference works on Japanese popular culture, including comics and film, and for its illustrated approaches to the study of Japanese characters. Its publication of a book on wabi-sabi by Leonard Koren in 1992 helped spur an international design revolution. Many Stone Bridge Press books have been adopted by high school and university classrooms. What has fascinated so many people about Japan is its extraordinarily rich coherency, how tenets of art and spirituality are reflected in work and daily life. For 1,500 years Japanese culture has been evolving in a more or less straight line, absorbing foreign influences but remaining identifiably "Japanese." It`s a culture that breeds both beauty and arrogance. It demands patience and erudition. And it gives the publisher delicious editorial challenges and an alluring design vocabulary: asymmetry, surface decoration, white space, boldness, delicacy, a quick splash of color.