Interview with Daisuke Nagatomo, Design Director of MisoSoupDesign, TW

Currently our major focus of business is the residential and commercial interior design. We work simultaneously on interior projects in Taiwan and other Asian countries. Along with interior projects, we also develop our own furniture design series, utilizing sustainable material such as cardboard.

We are very excited about winning MUSE Award! It means a lot to us to receive international recognitions in our one of favorite project, Spiral Stool.

We submitted our first mass produced furniture design, Spiral Stool, which incorporates only 3mm cardboard material and no requirement of any hardware to assemble.We chose Spiral Stool to enter the MUSE Awards since we are very proud of this design and we hoped we can earn more recognition for this design.

The biggest challenge for this design was to design the structural system for the sitting device by using only cardboard material. We have tested different details to experiment the possibilities of the joint system to carry a huge weight.

We won a few international awards in the past, which gave us a huge boost to pursue our design practice. It is also very important for us to track the trends in international design, so that winning awards can allow us to see other designs and be inspired by them.

1. Realizing our own design2. Collaboration with others3. Always challenging

Taiwan is unique in a sense that we can work very closely with local manufacturers. The manufacturing industry is sportive for creative designers and can offer cost effective solutions for producing top tier design works.

Digital technologies are shifting our design industry quite a bit. We feel like if we are not keen on it, everything will turn on a different direction. However, at the same time, we feel the tradition of our industry could be dismissed. It is most important that we keep balance to create more creative and interesting work.

Try the best you can!

Obviously the traditional medium such as books and magazines, and also advanced digital media such as internet sites. Nowadays, we find a lot of information via social media as well!

My teachers from Japan, USA, and Spain inspired me a lot.

Patience is the key of success.

Thank you to MUSE Awards for the opportunity!