Ichiro Iwasaki: Designing with Respect and Reality

21 November 2025

Ichiro Iwasaki is one of the most highly regarded Japanese designers in Europe. His collaborations with companies such as Vibia and Arper demonstrate a design vision that combines deep roots in Japanese culture with a sensitive openness to the history and values of the brands he works with.

The result is always coherent and surprising: simultaneously poetic and concrete. Iwasaki succeeds in combining sentiment and function, giving shape to a precise, measured aesthetic that transcends trends. It’s no coincidence that in his teaching, he places not only design thinking at the center but also perception, considered an essential skill for true growth in design.

What are the aspects of your design education that you appreciate the most now?

I teach product design at Tama Art University, and I believe university assignments should serve as catalysts for something further. By learning through experience what constitutes that catalyst, one can objectively view their own work, persistently contemplating even amidst struggles. Only by honestly observing one’s inner reactions and engaging sincerely can anything truly be grasped. Beyond that, rather than producing designers who merely think, I hope we nurture designers who can perceive. Without thinking, one cannot perceive; and those who can perceive surely possess the potential to become creators capable of nurturing themselves.

What are the values you pursue in your job?

We do not pursue any particular set of values, but we cherish the value that can only be derived by engaging with each client and the very essence required by their project.

For instance, while our involvement with Italian furniture manufacturer Arper, Spanish lighting manufacturer Vibia, and Japanese camera and lens manufacturer SIGMA all falls under product design, each possesses such a distinct world of its own that even a comparison of these three companies reveals fundamentally different approaches to design. Whereas European furniture and lighting designs are graceful and generous, Japanese industrial product design is precise and dignified.

Amidst differing project workflows, required perspectives, thoughts, commitments, living environments, and even languages, we remain constantly attuned to subtle nuances and significant differences. Within this lie numerous hints and insights. Even what might otherwise seem negative is, for us creators, positive. Precisely because we value these differences so highly, they lead to designs and emerging values that can only be born within each distinct world.

When approaching a new design project, what are your priorities?

‘Respect and Reality’: we place great importance on respecting the client’s background—encompassing history, culture, and people—alongside the project brief.

It is precisely this respect that allows us to intuitively discern what can be boldly transformed and what must be preserved, revealing the reality I must confront in each project.

By finding common ground in what transcends culture and resonates universally, we achieve outputs that strike closer to the core.

Talking about your collaboration with Vibia, how did it start, and what is your vision of lighting design and how it should be?

At the outset of our collaboration, I freely proposed ideas inspired by conversations with the Vibia CEO.

Following the adoption of Pin, we developed Tube, Flat, and our latest creation, Closer, through extensive discussions grounded in the brief and a heightened focus on the project.

Lighting influences mood and comfort more profoundly than most other products. We’ve grown accustomed to it because we encounter it daily without a second thought, yet its ability to instantly affect the human psyche is truly remarkable – the very essence of light’s allure. Whether seeking functional brightness and colour rendering or the mood lighting creates, each serves a distinct role. Yet both are indispensable in our lives, helping to regulate our daily emotions. From this perspective, when designing lighting, we don’t assume only night-time illumination. We envision various scenes and sensations – morning light, daytime light, twilight light, seasonal light – including the presence of the fixture when switched off.

The very fact that lighting offers scope for free imagination, rather than adhering to fixed ideals of how it should be, is part of its appeal. Some lighting colours the space, while other lighting resonates more intimately with personal sensations and emotions. I feel that each unique capability inherent to lighting is somehow connected to design.

I think your style is essential, magical, and colorful. Do you recognize yourself in this description?

In the world of European furniture design, designers like myself who work across such diverse fields as everyday items, highly specialised tools, precision equipment, furniture, and lighting may be few and far between. However, the commissions that come to product designers generally span multiple genres, and they do not necessarily possess expertise in every single one. What remains consistent, though, is that regardless of the field of work undertaken, the perspective is always that of an ordinary user, rather than that of a specialist.

Naturally, as a project progresses, one does come to understand the intricacies of that particular field. Yet, if one begins designing immersed in those intricacies from the outset, the process tends to become bogged down in minutiae. By stepping back and viewing it objectively as an everyday user, the ideal form begins to emerge. Perhaps because I approach projects with this mindset, strangely enough, even highly specialized products have often resulted in successful projects.

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