Michio Anazawa  - Japanese designer

He was born in Tokyo in 1973. From a very young age, he was attracted to the beauty of solid shapes around him and had great fondness for making things. Upon learning that he could utilize this in a career as a designer, he transferred into Kuwasawa Design School from the department of electronic engineering at the university in Tokyo. Kuwasawa was modeled on Bauhaus, which was the first design educational institution established in Japan. There, he learned the foundations of interior design and furniture design, before graduating in 1995. He then worked at a design office in Tokyo for four years. He was involved in the interior design of stores, offices, and hotels.

After leaving the company, he worked as a freelancer, and from 1999 to 2002, he performed branding work for Japanese companies working with the French design company Carré Noir. He supported much of the design work conducted by such shops in Japan, and learned a lot about global design work. In March 2000, he established his own studio, named Design Applet. He was entrusted with the interior design work of hotels with whom he had worked during his previous employment. In 2001, he was contacted by an acquaintance who had moved from a cantract furniture company to a trading company, and he participated for the first time in “furniture design as a retail trade material.” As someone who was used to interior features and contract furniture design, he was at first bewildered by knockdown specification, strict restrictions of technologies / material in overseas productions sites, and cost setting. However, fortunately that work was instantly adopted as the MUJI birch wood series products. This item was under production for a long time, and so a design agreement for various brand materials was formed with Mitsubishi Corporation, Japan’s largest trading company.

Following that, he was involved in much of the material development for interior shops, such as MUJI, Franc franc, which were developed as large-scale stores. The interest in solid objects from his youth was more closely related to this type of product design work than that to spatial design. In particular, within the limited conditions of chairs ( function / volume / strength / production factory engineering ), he was strongly attracted to the charm of constructing 3D microcosms. In recent years, there have been a growing number of reverse offers from overseas manufacturers whom he once visited as production bases. He is now working on a variety of interior products, paying attention to Japanese-influenced subtle sensitivity and functional beauty. These principles of timeless design will never feel dated.