Mr Naoto Fukasawa’s most important designs.

There are some well-known aphorisms in the world of industrial design, such as Mr Dieter Rams’ hallowed “less but better”, Le Corbusier’s viewpoint on the relationship between form and function (we trust you’re familiar with that one) and Mr Jony Ive’s assertion that good design should feel “inevitable”.

But there are, unless we’re mistaken, few design philosophies that reference soup. And yet soup is the substance to which legendary Japanese industrial designer Mr Naoto Fukasawa compares his process. Of course, when your design work is sought after by global brands including Muji, Hitachi and Samsung, you can compare it to any foodstuff you like. Plus, soup makes sense when Mr Fukasawa explains its relationship with the different markets he caters to. “The seasoning of the broth differs according to different countries, cultures and brands,” he says.

Mr Fukasawa now runs his own studio, which has designed everything from juice containers to escalators. Embodiment is a celebration of 100 pieces created throughout his career, a collection of everyday objects that prove that good design becomes unobtrusive, intuitive and invisible.

The breadth of pieces also shows the extent to which good design makes the world around us usable or, as Mr Fukasawa says, lets “your body communicate with the environment, without thinking”.

Read on for an introduction to three of his most important pieces.

If this wall-mounted CD player looks familiar, that’s because you may have seen it on display in Muji or, indeed, in the V&A museum in London. It’s also undoubtedly Mr Fukasawa’s best-known piece of design. The wall-mounted CD player sums up his approach: create objects that are beyond intuitive, which feel like you know them before you see them. In this case, the CD player is intended to stir memories of domestic extractor fans, which adorn the walls of millions of homes around the world. The exposed, spinning disc of the CD brings to mind whirring fan blades, while, even more playfully, the drawstring cord that hangs from the base of the unit looks like a fan’s on/off switch. It invites the user to play music almost without thinking and sums up the idea that good design should never need an instruction manual.

When you think about it, elevators are among the most important technologies ever created. They are what give cities such as London, New York and especially Tokyo their third dimension. They’re what make skyscrapers possible. Mr Fukasawa has a very human take on these boxes. He notes how, when inside them, we lean against the walls, check ourselves out in the mirror and even breathe differently, depending on how many people are in the lift. “These are things that people use without really consciously thinking and… I’ve come to think that I’d like to improve them through design,” he says. “I believe that if the elevator you used on a daily basis was suddenly spruced up, it would make you feel good, and you’d wonder, ‘What’s changed?’”

When Mr Fukasawa visited Maruni Wood Industry in Japan in 2004, he was “blown away” by the company’s extraordinarily advanced wood carving capabilities and the sheer scale of its timber yard. But it wasn’t until 2006, when Maruni asked him to design a piece of furniture for it, that their enduring partnership would begin. The piece was the humble Hiroshima chair. It is cleverly designed to look as though it’s carved from a single block of wood. The simple lines belie the complexity in its production, which combines a mixture of automation and curves that can only be worked by hand. If the idea were to create a supremely tactile, ergonomic object, then the result is a resounding success. As Embodiment notes, “People who buy this chair naturally glide their hands over its back as they converse.”

And that’s a pretty good summation of the charming humility of Mr Fukasawa’s designs. He wants them to make you feel good, without you even noticing them.

Embodiment (Phaidon) by Mr Naoto Fukasawa is out on 23 March

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