

Kenya Hara On Japanese Aesthetics - dmytton
http://informationarchitects.jp/kenya-hara-on-japanese-aesthetics/

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elblanco
I've always found this dichotomy interesting. Japan is revered for spawning a
deep, simple and beautiful aesthetic sense.

Yet, Japanese streets are a virtual assault on your senses. Like malevolent
beings trying to overload your optical pathways.

[http://maps.google.co.jp/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=ja&#...</a><p>(maybe not the
best example, but I picked someplace pretty random that looked like a
commercial district).<p>And I've noticed this same visual clutter in Japanese
website design.<p><a href="http://car.nifty.com/"
rel="nofollow">http://car.nifty.com/</a><p><a href="http://www.guesthouse-
apartment.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.guesthouse-apartment.com/</a><p>etc.

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sketerpot
I actually think that's a great street. It's dense and walkable. It has enough
splashes of color that it's not drab. The buildings are a mix of shops,
offices, and apartments, so you don't need to get in your car and wait in
traffic for 20 minutes to get anywhere. It may seem cluttered, but it's
excellent design for a place to live -- and your eye learns to ignore the
clutter in about a week or so.

And it's not all megabuildings, either. I'd wager that there's some pretty
green space within easy walking distance.

~~~
elblanco
I agree. Places like Tokyo and Seoul are visually assaulting. But you get used
to it. And they are super walkable. But they make similarly hustle and bustle
places like downtown Manhattan look calm and tame by comparison.

I'm just not sure how to reconcile in my head this type of urban layout with
the Japanese aesthetic.

~~~
sketerpot
I went to downtown Chicago last summer, and my reaction was "Wait, this is
_it?_ Weaksauce!"

Actually, that's how I react to most American city planning these days, now
that I've learned what a proper city can be.

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JulianMorrison
Japanese aesthetics: bright, loud, ultra-cute, with a mascot character and a
theme song.

Oh, you meant the other Japanese aesthetics.

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johnl
You might say the Japanese art of Aesthetics is finding order and beauty in
items and situations that most of us take for granted.

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javert
The arcicle promises to answer this question:

 _What makes Japanese design so special? Basically, it’s a matter of
simplicity; a particular notion of simplicity, different from what simplicity
means in the West._

It doesn't.

It talks about a German-made knife vs. a Japanese-made knife, but the
Japanese-made knife simply _is_ more simple. They aren't "simple" in different
ways.

~~~
dkarl
The German knife is simpler in that there is a single obvious way to grasp the
knife.

Edited to add: I still have no idea how that makes it less "Japanese" than the
Japanese knife.

~~~
rdtsc
I would summarize it as:

    
    
         German design goal: functionality and comfort, user is at the center.
    
         Japanese design goal: aesthetics, the tool is at the center.
    

It is possible, that a Japanese chef will feel and work better working with an
aesthetic and clean looking knife. The chef's skill is praised in as much as
it can make use of the beautifully designed knife (i.e. the craftsmanship
culture).

A German (Western) chef will work better with any knife that fits his hand
better. The chef is at the center of the design. A knife is an extension of a
chef's hand.

~~~
dkarl
I think the Japanese knife is at one pole of the fundamental user interface
dilemma: to what extent do you cater to common actions at the expense of
expert actions? The Japanese knife says that any concession made to one
specific use will unacceptably hinder other uses.

The German knife is specialized for one particular hand position. In a way, it
is actually prescriptive and restrictive: if you try to use it a different way
than expected, you will have an inferior experience. The designers (hopefully)
studied usage and decided that they could optimize for the common case without
hindering other cases too much, thereby getting a better result. It doesn't
matter if uncommon cases are a little awkward.

It's just common sense that the optimum design will reject the do-nothing
approach and provide _some_ kind of non-use-agnostic tweak. However, ten years
of software development work have given me much more appreciation for the
assumption embodied in the Japanese knife. It's pessimistic and will never be
the best (except in the eyes of design gurus who never actually use stuff) but
by god it will never stop you from doing what you want.

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zeynel1
Is there japanese esthetics that applies in programming?

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dkarl
I've seen several people write about Matz's design principles for Ruby, but I
can't find what the man himself wrote. I'd love to read that if someone with
better google-fu can dig it up.

~~~
ajross
I'm sure Ruby's design is worth study, and maybe there are things identifiably
"japanese" about it. But surely simplicity and symmetry are _not_ among them.
It's a very large language, with many non-orthogonal features -- cleaner than
perl or C++, but certainly nothing like, say, Lua or Clojure.

~~~
dkarl
Are simplicity and symmetry any more Japanese than they are, say, Greek or
Swedish? I think you need to go deeper than that to identify something
uniquely Japanese.

I read the two interviews linked by domgblackwell, and it's hard to tell. In
the first interview, from 2001, the only design principle he cites is the
principle of least surprise. In the 2003 interview, he says he didn't think of
that, it was just an observation other people made about Ruby. He talks about
the folly of pursuing perfection, "harmonious" rather than orthogonal
features, and how the programmer feels when using the language, comfort, joy,
etc. That actually sounds pretty Japanese, but the fact that he had a much
better articulated design philosophy in 2003 than in 2001 makes me think we
will never know what implicit design philosophy guided his creation of Ruby.
His purported design philosophy is at least partly a retrospectively
constructed just-so story he invented to explain how he was able to come up
with Ruby. It makes sense that a Japanese creator, upon discovering that he
had created something beautiful, would use familiar concepts to try to explain
how he did it.

