Articles

Series: Auxiliary Lines for Things & People #17: Talking About Books

2024.02.29

PROFILE

Mai Tsuno / Design Writer

After graduating from Keio University's Faculty of Environmental Information, she worked for a manufacturer and served as an assistant to designer Shunji Yamanaka from 2012 to 2016. She then spent a year in Scotland and is now working as a freelancer.
While exploring ways to convey what needs to be communicated without hesitation, she writes for various media such as "Nikkei Design," organizes exhibitions, and does copywriting.
Her main work includes structuring the University of Tokyo's Institute of Industrial Science 70th Anniversary Exhibition "Potentialities: Exhibition for a Possible Future" (National Art Center, Tokyo, 2018), and writing texts for the exhibition "Insects: Models for Design" (21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, 2019).
Instagram / Web

I don't usually talk about books. I basically do not talk about them on social media, and if I think back, I don't talk about the books I've read except with my close friends. But of course, I have many favorite books, and there are stories that I want to share with others.

Recently, due to my work, I had the opportunity to look over my bookshelves and did a bit of categorising. This made me feel like writing about some of my important books. There are many kinds of books, but this time I would like to introduce books that have 'collecting' as one of their themes. I could fill this short essay with just one book, but I've gathered five for this time. Some of them are already out of print, so please do check them out if you are interested.

Sae Honda's "Anthropophyta / 人工植物門"

Designer Sae Honda has a unique perspective of giving value to materials that have so far been overlooked, like creating artificial stones from plastic waste or finding new value in artificial pearls. This book analyses and categorizes 'artificial plants', aka artificial flowers, under the assumption that they are a formal part of botany.

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