Trico Design Love!
16 Sept - 12 Nov 2005
“design should be friendly and at the same time it should be serious.“
“Enjoy design the same as beer!”
Established in 1996 Trico have been serious about creating an international circle of friends that share this philosophy of design. This is not a company of grand gestures or heroic acts of design but of small human endeavors and cross-cultural playfulness.
Trico Design Love! at The Aram Gallery is the first dedicated exhibition of Trico outside Japan.
Trico, also known as Bytrico, Suki and Airconditioned, originally designed and produced imported designs for the Japanese and particularly Tokyo market. In the past year they have opened a new gallery, shop, studio and events space in a regenerated area in Tokyo, and launched a redesign of their much visited website. After nine years of activity their catalogue has grown to include many hundreds of articles by an ever-growing group of designers. In spite of the expansion of activities and production volume they remain a small super active design studio with core values of direct and personal communications.
The unique informal email based development process and hands on prototyping approach has made possible the production of many projects by designers from countries, as the UK, in which small scale production is often very challenging, enabling their fresh ideas to become products in the Tokyo gallery and now in London.
Clarity of the ideas is the key to understanding the design thinking of Trico co-founders Suki Sakurai and Hitoshi Saeki, this is what seems to guide them when designing and choosing for production.
Trico tap into a cross-cultural affinity with ideas of playful quirkiness that seems to be very much at home with many UK based designers. Many of the products bytrico produce, whether they are witty, whimsical, or plain twisted are often based on one simple idea, adapted into a product.
Each design is an idea that brings service with a smile and often leads to further thought. The accumulating activity and prolific produce demonstrate a belief in design ingenuity and appreciation of playful human expression. The Trico philosophy is just as much about people that it is about design.
Along side the exhibits there are some email communications and sketches from the development process of ideas into products, This show also includes four prototypes by young designers that may become part of the Trico group in the future.
Will this circle of friends brought together by the sensibilities of Trico become more then a commercial proposition?
Exhibition design: Daniel Charny Studio
Curator: Daniel Charny
Gallery Director: Zeev Aram
