Seven and a half years in Silicon Valley: the American chapter of Naoto Fukasawa

Before Tokyo there was San Francisco. In 1989 Naoto Fukasawa, a native of Yamanashi born in 1956 and trained in product design at Tama Art University, left Seiko Epson for ID Two, soon to be IDEO, and spent seven and a half years designing for the industries of Silicon Valley. He went home in 1996 and opened his own office in 2003; today MoMA, New York, holds two of his objects in its permanent collection, the INFOBAR phone for au/KDDI and the wall-mounted CD player for Muji, and in 2024 the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Collab Design Excellence Award went to him. The client list runs past seventy brands, from Herman Miller and Emeco to Samsung and Alessi, and the awards include the Isamu Noguchi Award and an IDEA Gold. What he looks for, he calls Without Thought: the gesture a person makes before thinking about it.

Two of those houses are in the La Mercanti catalog for American projects: Emeco, for which he designed the Za stool in 2021, handmade in Hanover, Pennsylvania, in recycled aluminum, and Fantini, with the AF/21 faucets of the Aboutwater collection.