What if you forgot what you knew?
An experiment on making things unknown by Japanese designer, Kenya Hara.
Take a moment. Read these three words slowly.
Eggs. River. X-ray.
What came to mind?
Hold those images. Now consider these:
What if an eggshell had wrinkles, deep, skin-like wrinkles? Would it still feel like an egg to you?
Can you look at a pile of garbage on a riverbank and actually see the river it came from?
What might you feel if you saw an X-ray of a human body, made entirely of pressed flowers?
Something shifts, doesn’t it? The egg, the river, the X-ray — you thought you knew them. And then, suddenly, you don’t.
That’s Ex-formation at work.
The idea belongs to Kenya Hara, one of Japan’s most celebrated graphic designers. For Hara, the explosion of knowledge available to us today can actually be dangerous for creativity. Ex-formation describes how little we really know, and makes that the starting point for design.
As he puts it: “What moves people’s hearts, in every case, is the unknown.”
As a professor at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, Hara spent over a decade with students exploring familiar subjects like rivers, wrinkles, plants, smoke, air, by first aspiring to ‘unknow’ them. To approach each as if encountering it for the very first time.
The goal wasn’t more information. It was to incite wonderment, and in doing so, awaken discoveries that knowledge alone never could.
We live surrounded by things we’ve stopped seeing— a ceiling fan, a coffee mug, the sound of rain on glass. Our brain, efficient as it is, files them away under known and moves on.
Ex-formation is an invitation to pull those things back out. To hold them up to the light and ask— do I actually know this, or do I just recognise it?
There’s a difference. And in that gap, something wonderful lives.
On a quest to unknow,
Team FUEL.