Naoto Fukasawa Description

Naoto Fukasawa was born in 1956 in Yamanashi-Prefecture, Japan. He graduated from Tama Art University's Product Design Department in art and 3D design in 1980.

From 1980 to 1988 Fukasawa worked as a designer for Seiko Epson Corp. He moved to the US in 1989, where he worked for ID Two, the predecessor of IDEO. 1996 Fukasawa returned to Japan and built the IDEO-office in Tokio.

After having acted as the head of the American company IDEO's Tokyo office, he established Naoto Fukasawa Design in January 2003. Representative works include MUJI'S CD player (part of the permanent collection, MoMA New York), the mobile phones "Infobar" and "neon" and the ±0 brand of household electrical appliances and sundries.

In the past, his designs have won over fifty awards, including the American IDEA Gold Award, the German if Gold Award, the British D&AD Gold Award, the Mainichi Design Award and the 5th Oribe Award.
He is a professor at Musashino Art University and a visiting lecturer at Tama Art University. He has authored such books as "An Outline of Design" (TOTO) and co-authored others such as "The Ecological Approach to Design".

In recent years, he has released a host of new works with Italian companies B&B Italia, Driade, Magis, Artemide, Danese and Boffi, as well as in Germany and Northern Europe, and they have garnered a great deal of attention.