A Little Boast

To live creatively as a designer, I believe the powers of curiosity, initiative, observation, imagination, and expression are indispensable.

Even if you have curiosity, if you don’t take action it ends at “I know it, I’ve seen it”—it stops at knowledge.

If you approach everything with a spirit of curiosity, take action, and set your observation and imagination to work, then wisdom—the knowledge gained from real experience, plus something more—is born, and by expressing that realization in your field of strength, originality and persuasive power arise.

I always talk about this sort of thing in the lectures I’m in charge of.

Once, a student asked me this: “I’m poor at imagination. How can I make my imagination richer?”

Honestly, I was flustered by the difficult question, but the imagining that came to me on the spot was to answer, “You have the imagination to imagine that you have no imagination—that’s a wonderful thing.”

My everyday medium of expression is plants and flowers, but I got a bit carried away thinking the words that came to me on a whim weren’t half bad—and my own imagination, drunk on itself, is a pitiful thing.