Japanese industrial designer Toshiyuki Kita will chair the jury and curate the fifth international EcoDesign exhibition that will be held this fall in conjunction with Finland’s Habitare design fair. He joins the prominent ranks of previous exhibition curators including Kristiina Lassus, Konstantin Grcic, Ingo Maurer and Yrjö Kukkapuro.
A team of design students from the Aalto University led by Professor Jouko Järvisalo will create the architecture for the exhibition, which will house the best of some 50 entries as selected by Kita.
Toshiyuki Kita
This year, the theme of the exhibition will be using wood as a material. The designers’ brief is to create and present wooden pieces of furniture and interior design articles, or new, insightful and necessary commercial wood-based solutions. The entries must be made from 80% wood and 20% some other environmentally friendly material.
Kita works in both Japan and Italy, and has designed many hit products for German, Italian and Japanese manufacturers. His clients include Sharp, Mitsubishi, Cassina, Moroso, Magis, Stile Life, Interprofile, Miz, Minerva, Vaner Furniture and Ms System. He also designs traditional Japanese handicrafts.
His designs have been included in the collections of museums around the world, including the MoMA in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. He has had two exhibitions in Helsinki, in 1992 and in 1999.
Habitare is the largest furniture, interior decoration and design fair in Finland and will take place from September 18 through 22, 2013. The event attracts nearly 60,000 people annually.
