Popular design is design that is accessible, contemporary and part of popular culture. Typically, it emphasises appearance, user-friendliness and corporate identity. Since its social value is inextricably bound to the marketplace and commercial restrictions, popular design is mostly affirmative design; it reinforces the present state of things and conforms to cultural, social, technical and economic expectations.
This is problematic, especially when at its worst, popular design simply reinforces capitalist values—helping to create and maintain the constant consumerist dissatisfaction and desire for new products, as well as ensuring product obsolescence. An intellectual stance and credibility is often lost in such design.
In contrast, unpopular critical design asks questions, provokes and makes us think. It challenges conventions and preconceptions about technology, consumerism and cultural values—and how they shape our lives. Approaching design with a critical perspective is hence taking on a more responsible and pro-active role within society, and this is important considering the perfect position design occupies for stimulating discussion and debate among designers, industry and the public.
Summarising the differences between popular and unpopular art:
Following, using the concepts introduced by Dunne and Raby in Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects, I will explore how Maywa Denki’s Pachi-Moku might be evaluated as an unpopular design that adopts a critical perspective.
MAYWA DENKI: PACHI-MOKU
Source: https://www.maywadenki.com/history/
Maywa Denki is an art unit set up by two Japanese brothers, Masamichi and Nobumichi Tosa. Fusing art, commercialism and corporate culture, they present and actively promote themselves as an “electric company in a parallel world”, with a whole ecosystem constructed to support this corporate identity:
Source: https://www.maywadenki.com/
Besides having the turquoise costume as their uniform, they have a comprehensive company website with a company profile, business model documentation, product promotion (performance) details, as well as an online shop for merchandise including CDs, uniforms and stationery. They even have a fan page that facilitates membership application (which is paid).
Source: https://www.maywadenki.com/denkyo/denkyo_about/
Source: https://maywadenki.stores.jp/
They produce mainly 2 kinds of designs: art resources (A) and mass-produced objects (the BCDEF merchandise), and Pachi-Moku falls under A.
Pachi-Moku is a mechanical backpack-type “winged” device operated by electronic finger snappers that control double mallets to hit wooden temple blocks. The device produces two tones: high and low. Its mechanical components consist of analogue leather belts, motors, solenoids, and switches
Source: https://www.maywadenki.com/products/tsukuba/pachi-moku-3/
How is Pachi-Moku unpopular design?
Very clearly, Pachi-Moku is not your typical popular design that prioritises appearance and user-friendliness or conforms to expectations.
It has an eccentric appearance with a seemingly amateurish sheen to the gadgetry and it challenges conventions on multiple levels.
“When creating instruments as art, I only think about the visuals; the sound doesn’t really matter”
Designed as an instrument, instead of sound, it prioritises visuals.
“A typical electronics manufacturer is making ‘electricity machines’ that are useful for people. However, Maywa Electric is not so”
As an electronic device, it is also not useful and functional in the expected sense.
“Pachi-Moku has been continuously upgraded, mainly for improving the visual appearance. The only problem is that it’s getting heavier and heavier.”
“Excuse me, but this instrument weighs 13kg, I can’t breathe anymore. Let me take it off. The problem is I can’t take it off myself. It’s design flaw.”
It is also not in the least user-friendly and easy to carry or play because of its heavy weight. The artist Tosa acknowledges this as a design flaw in his TED talk introducing Pachi-Moku, but one should note that this design “flaw” is intentional on his part.
“People don’t want something that can’t help people“
Pachi-Mochu is not produced for actual use in the first place and hence not sold. Quoting the artists, Pachi-Moku is “something that can’t help people”, an “almost useless” electricity machine that “cannot be used as a human being”, hence it is called a “nonsense machine”.
How then, is Pachi-Moku critical design?
What critical perspectives do the unpopular qualities above support and how are they effective in stimulating reflection?
Source: https://www.maywadenki.com/products/tsukuba/
Pachi-Moku is one of the instruments of the Tsukuba Series consisting of musical devices that operate at 100V through motors and electromagnets. This series is inspired by the changes to the nature of music with modern technological advancements. With the spread of IT apparatus like the sampler, synthesizer and internet, music has been dematerialised and become disembodied from the musical instruments that originally produced them, or in Maywa Denki’s words, become “separated from ‘a substance’” and “now considered as information”. Through speakers, what people encounter is not music but digital information and data on music. With the Tsukuba Series, the artists try to revive music from “Information Music” to “Substantial Music” once again with machines that physically create sounds. In their product write-up, they describe the music produced by these musical devices as “music of the 21st century”.
The relatively conservative and analogue technologies used for Pachi-Moku however, contrast this futuristic narrative presented. It is humorous and somewhat absurd that the instrument uses elaborate mechanisms to produce sounds that are otherwise primitive or effortlessly created; machinery and electricity are used to power physical beating or knocking movements that can be created with hands alone, without technology. Through this, the artists emphasise the challenge of reviving live music through the Tsukuba series—requiring the power of machines for the agenda. Engaging through humour and surprise this way, I think the artists successfully challenge technological values and stimulate reflection among users on how the nature of music has been shaped by technology.
Source: https://www.maywadenki.com/business/concert/
Besides the unpredictable and eccentric design of Pachi-Moku, the performances that Maywa Denki organizes to demonstrate how it is used add to its humour and appeal. In TED talks and Tsukuba performances, the artist cracks jokes about the product and plays the instrument while executing comical dance moves. Design is used as a form of entertainment, engaging viewers in performances that at once recall acts of TV personalities and comedians in popular culture, while being framed also as avant-garde performance art pieces. The importance of this entertainment value attached to Pachi-Moku is clear from how Maywa Denki signs itself under the amusement and entertainment division of a Japanese TV agency (Yoshimoto Kogyo Co. Ltd agency for managing TV personalities and comedians).
Although the futuristic vision of reimagining and resurrecting music has a fictive value, we see that Pachi-Moku also remains grounded in reality and accessible to the everyday and larger public through its promotional performances. As a critical design, Pachi-Moku skillfully fuses fiction with reality to engage people. According to the reading, effective critical designs communicate value fictions by “letting people see them in use, placed in everyday life, but in a way that leaves room for viewer’s imagination”. This is precisely what Maywa Denki does. Without actually using the product themselves, users, or rather viewers, are engaged in the music of Pachi-Moku instead through the experience of performances. Their promotion performances emphasise the experiences offered by Pachi-Moku instead of the object’s formal, technical and structural properties—communicating narratives of consumption, as opposed to narratives of production.
“Matsu (pine) Course”
Full live performance in which large-size musical instruments, robots, President, four workers and sometimes Mr. Wono at the accounting department appear. (Performance time: 90 to 120 minutes)
” Take(bamboo) Course”
Performance in which President and two workers appear. You can enjoy a stage show unique to Maywa Denki. (Performance time: 30 to 60 minutes)
“Ume (plum) course ”
Performance in which only President plays a live show, using the minimum equipment. (Performance time: 15 to 30 minutes)
In evaluating Pachi-Moku as a critical design, it is important to also consider the product as part of a larger ecosystem of a corporate identity that Maywa Denki has constructed. This identity occupies both the grounds of fiction and reality; while their rhetoric of being an electronics company is fictive, they are not a wholly “imaginary” corporation because they do actually produce and sell merchandise and services, albeit unconventional ones, and earn revenue from them. The have a fan base spanning across generations that buys their mass-produced merchandise and attends their concerts wearing the turquoise uniforms. Maywa Denki’s success at making profit as a pseudo electronics company contributes to allowing Pachi-Moku to extend reflection among users, to consider the culture of consumerism and materialism as well, beyond our relationship with technology and music. By appropriating the organizational structures of businesses, Maywa Denki both embraces and challenges the market and its values.
Nonsense machines | Meiwa Denki | TEDxUTokyo
To conclude, I think this statement of theirs sums up how Pachi-Moku and their nonsense machines embody alternative values that present critical perspectives. Pachi-Moku does not conform to popular values or present a realistic design, but neither is it wholly futuristic nor abstract. Instead, it occupies both ends of the spectrum—achieving what I think is a good balance—making it a critical design that is neither absorbed into everyday reality nor dismissed as too elitist.
In the reading, Dunne and Raby distinguish unpopular design as “products for the mind”—engaging users in reflection and imagination as opposed to popular design that is activated by actual usage. I think Pachi-Moku is indeed a product for the mind, and an engaging one at that, but also foremost an eccentric feast for the eyes and ears.
Bibliography:
Link to slides:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/127MJL1dQgaSnmtKT_pVHDMoQMo5HDhxFDkZ63mwP2YQ/edit?usp=sharing
