PURE & SIMPLE
Mieko Kusano
Mieko Kusano co-designed the Sonos SUB, winner of the IDEA 2013 Curator’s Choice Award, which is awarded by The Henry Ford’s chief curator each year.
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JANUARY-MAY 2014
After attending numerous shows and events at Heath Ceramics, turning the focus to Sonos, a Santa Barbarabased manufacturer of consumer electronics, feels at first like a leap into the future. The team at Sonos creates multizone digital music systems and surrounds itself with music innovators from Questlove to Deadmau5. Last year, Sonos built a studio in Los Angeles to showcase music the team loves and create a space for soundfocused art installations. The visionary gallery space, filled with state-ofthe-art Sonos sound equipment and experimental art and music projects, might at first seem light years away from the world of Heath, but then enters Mieko Kusano, who, working with a team of designers and engineers, turns any preconceived notion on its head. Kusano, who is half-Dutch and halfJapanese, was raised in the Netherlands and traveled to Japan many times. “I was heavily influenced by both cultures in terms of my design thinking and design aesthetics,” shared Kusano. “The functional minimalism from Northern Europe meeting the Zen experience of Japan formed an interesting recipe for me, to find tension or balance in a design aesthetic that is on the one hand reduced to its essence, but on the other hand provokes an emotional connection.” Discovering a thread linking both of these California innovators to Japan starts to make even more sense. Finding a connection for both companies to ceramics brought on a whole new “aha” moment. Kusano said, “One of my father’s closest friends, Masaya Yoshimura, decided later in life to pursue his passion and learn ceramic art at Kuwasawa Design School.” Kusano visited his workspace, called Nazuna Kama, for the first time in the ’90s when she was in her early 20s and studying industrial design engineering. “The trips to his workspace were very inspiring,” she said. “His