Osaka Brand Center

While based in Osaka, Chiaki Murata and his brand, METAPHYS, are far better recognized in the design industry both in Tokyo as well as in the rest of the world. To inspire his creative ideas, Murata again employs a unique method of his own. “For METAPHYS, I use my own designing approach that I call “design by action, which is obviously different from conventional design styles,” says Murata. “Generally speaking, visual elements such as shapes and colors are considered as a top priority in the process of designing. Instead, I take a solution-business style approach: my design is defined by how we solve a target issue. The most important thing here is to determine problems, or “bugs,” and this requires careful observations. When I make observations and am able to detect a bug, I have finished 80 percent of my work. The rest is for colors and shapes and other visual matters.”
Let’s think about the case of designing a hanger, for example. When you take off your business suit, would you take off the jacket first or the pants? Most people would answer that they would take off the jacket first. When Murata asked for a reason to those who answered the opposite, they said they would take the pants off first because it is hard to put them on a hanger if the jacket is already on it. This, in turn, indicates that most people who said they would take off the jacket first must be finding it difficult as well to hang the pants after the jacket. Here Murata finds a bug – a daily inconvenience to which nobody has really given thought to a possible solution. For METAPHYS, “design by action” in this case means to create a hanger on which the jacket can be hung first then the pants without difficulty. “My goal is to turn my small discoveries in everyday life to the products that inspire consumers’ empathy, by adding a touch of humor,” says Murata.