Nendo oki sato biography of williams az

Oki Sato is the chief designer and founder of the “Nendo” studio.

Amazed by the way architects and designers worked freely between disciplines, Sato and his colleagues decided that they too wished to experiment with new techniques and forms through whichever medium inspired them, without restraint. Later that year Sato established the design studio Nendo, expanding three years later with an office in Milan. Since then, Nendo has transformed spaces and inspired lives across the globe with projects in the fields of architecture, interior design, furniture, products, events and graphics.

In Japanese, Nendo means free-form clay, a soft, fluid substance that signifies the flexibility with which the design team executes their projects. For Nendo, the simplest ideas and the smallest designs create the most unusual experiences. The narrative of each piece is also important; these stories are, in fact, the starting point for most projects.

Tiny earphones that look like jellyfish are packaged in plastic containers that resemble specimen jars.

Oki Sato is Chief Designer and Founder of nendo.

A roll of pleated paper, often by-products of Issey Miyake clothing, unravels to become Cabbage, a chair as beautiful as it is comfortable. All objects in the collection focus on form, ridding themselves of any distractions by using only woods and metals and reducing all color to black. The Melt chair is but one example of the expressed poetry of form.

A single, continuous curve moves from the back legs through to the backrest, arm and front legs as all structural elements melt into one. Designs like Timber, a stool in the form of three pieces of wood that lean against each other, encourage us to pay close attention to how we interact with the objects we use. As one casually leans on the stool, they imitate its form, defining a harmony between user and object.