(Kiyoshi Awazu’s Notebook of Design Thinking)

Inscribed by Kiyoshi Awazuto to Toshi Katayama at Harvard’s Carpenter Center in January of 1976, this one contains sixty-one essays on design. While designers like Paul Rand were perfecting a certain kind of modern clarity, Awazu was using this “Notebook” to argue for “gaps, fissures, and openings”—intentional breaks in the regulated, flattened urban experience. Or, at least that’s what AI is telling us. The whole book is in Japanese and we can’t easily read a word. But we can appreciate it both for its many illustrations and as a nice, rare thing. But if you can read Japanese or need an excuse to learn how, this one is for you.