Designers and craftspeople are trained in a predominantly material tradition. In addition to enhancing creative thinking and the ability to formulate new types of logic, this training prepares design and craft practitioners to produce, reproduce, and understand non-linguistic systems of representation.

Collaboration between designers and craftspeople thereby entails an interpretation exercise underpinned by the exchange of shared symbol systems, which in turn implies that the production of meaning in this kind of practice is not tied to the verbalization of ideas but rather to the transformation of matter. Following this line of thought, ‘Translations’ employs traditional fabrication techniques as a means to investigate the interpretive mechanisms that take place in collaborative making.

The project received funding from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the Kyoto Institute of Technology (KIT), and the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT). The study was conducted during the course of JICA’s eight-month fellowship program 日本のデザインと伝統技術 ‘Modern Design and Traditional Craftsmanship’ in the Postgraduate School of Science and Technology at the KIT.

Besides being supported by the institutions mentioned above, the project benefited from the deliberate participation of about fifty craftspeople distributed in more than thirty manufacturing units across Japan. As a result, ‘Translations’ led to the production of four design collections: the Kyoto Series, the Yamanaka Series, the Naniwa Series, and the Suruga Series.