We at the kyoto ddd gallery are delighted to welcome art director and designer Keizo Matsui to curate an exhibition of six designers from his hometown of Hiroshima.

A designer’s work has changed in recent years as network technology largely does away with former limitations on where one may work, and today, it seems more and more designers work freely and unbound by such restrictions. In regional centers nationwide, designers quite unlike any other are attracting attention for their work. It appears, however, that much of the emphasis is on how they use design to create solutions to local issues; much is made of their contribution to the revitalization of towns and regions while their artistic expression is relegated to secondary consideration at best.

Certainly, using community-conscious design as a vehicle for rediscovering a region’s charms is one of design’s important roles, but it is not the be-all and end-all. In 3D & Flat-Lab.: The Wonder of Playing with Hands and Brains, we seek not only to showcase the community-rooted work of those designers, but also to dive deeper into their approaches to design itself and discover what drives them to do what they do.

3D & Flat-Lab. is a collective of creative people who pursue “the wonder of playing with hands and brains .” Although all six core members are based in Hiroshima Prefecture, they come from a diverse range of backgrounds and are active in Japan and internationally. Much more than just coworkers, the team is unified by a shared, deep-felt, fundamental attitude toward design, and their works are the result of the quest to balance and harmonize design-oriented and art-oriented thinking.

This exhibition features designs that invite the viewer to participate—that create physical and sensual connections between the artists and the audience, and among the audience itself, thus generating a feedback loop of stimulation. Visitors are rewarded with a palpable undulation of wonder of playing with hands and brains.

We at the kyoto ddd gallery see this as the first of many events aimed at showcasing community-rooted designers from regions throughout Japan, not only showing their work but also delving deep into their creative mindsets and lifestyles.