Interview with Keiji Ashizawa

Study Series
Interview with Keiji Ashizawa
“Honest Design Throughout”
#01 Honesty = design, “honest design” theory
#02 Propose furniture and products by leveraging the strengths of architects
#03 Effective SNS of design office is Instagram 1 choice!
#04 Architects must be unique

(This page is a continuation from #02 Propose furniture and products by leveraging the strengths of architects)

─ You use Instagram to communicate your activities daily (Keiji Ashizawa’s Instagram). Could you tell us about your creative process?

Ashizawa: The Ashizawa office’s Instagram is mainly in English.
When we checked our company’s followers’ demographics, about 16% of the total number of people reading Ashizawa’s Instagram account is reading it in Japanese.
In other words, 84% of them are foreign-language speakers. Of those, about 40% of them are English-speaking. That includes the US, UK, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

We also have many Scandinavian followers for the “KARIMOKU CASE STUDY” project I mentioned earlier (#02), probably because we’re working with a Danish designer.

Right now, the only social networking site for architecture is Instagram. Nobody looks at your history on Facebook, but Instagram allows you to see your account all at once.
From a client’s point of view, Instagram has the same format, and it’s easy to compare. So it’s client-friendly.

It’s about architects and designers, “What do they do?” And if you want to look into it, Instagram is the quickest way to find out. It’s easy to communicate what kind of variety you’re working with.

In the old days, people would have searched for the office’s name and visited their respective websites, but each website has different rules, so it’s hard to know what to touch in an instant.

Besides, the websites would suddenly say something like, “Please wait…” You have to wait for a while. I think people have lost their tolerance for that kind of stress.

Ashizawa: On Instagram, the viewer knows the rules, so all you have to do is look at the whole thing with a bang, and then snap a glance at the parts that caught your attention. And that’s how you get compared to them.
Like, “What does this person do?” or “What is this office like? Then that’s the gate.

If you don’t have a proper entrance gate, you will be judged as if everything you do is not good. If you can’t do SNS properly, you shouldn’t do it.

If you look at the Instagram of the world’s leading architects’ firms, many of them are putting in the effort to get it right.
The designers have already been given credit for their work on Instagram alone. It’s like, “Oh, that’s how it feels.
It’s brutal, isn’t it? And then people don’t go to the website.

That’s why you have to make your website simple, too, because it’s essential to be able to go where you want to go in a flash. By doing so, you can get people to stay on your site for a long time.

Social networking sites are when you want to know what you want to know, and when you want to know it immediately. Unlike magazines, it’s not something you sit on the couch and look at carefully.

And now, I keep my personal and office accounts separate.
If a pasta dish looks good, I’ll upload it to my account. It’s not that I’m passionate about restaurant food, but there are certain things that I don’t want to put up on my office account. Individuals need to have their fun.

We also tried the time of day to upload. 16% of the respondents are Japanese, and 84% are foreigners. Japan’s time difference is 14 hours in the eastern part of the United States and 8 hours in Europe.
I tried to match it to the morning in some places or the time of day after work since not many people would flip through it while at work.

Lately, I’ve made it a routine to post around 6-7 am in Japan. That way, I’ll be posting later in the evening in Europe and the evening in the US.

─ How often do you update your Instagram?

Ashizawa: I post a couple of times a week. I write the text at once at some point, though. Now, I ask others to do it for me.

We have the photos trimmed by us. Cropping is necessary. Most of the images are horizontally oriented, aren’t they architectural photos?
When you look at horizontal photos on your phone, they get smaller, especially on Instagram, and one photo gets smaller, so you end up with the previous or next post at the top or bottom of the screen. That distracts the viewer.

So I use vertical (portrait) photos on Instagram. The ratio is 10:8; even a square image is still better than a horizontal picture. It’s simple.

I tell photographers to shoot about 80% of their photos vertically. Even so, photographers still have a sense of the magazine layout, so they shoot in the horizontal orientation.
But that doesn’t mean you don’t need horizontal photos, or that they’re not necessary.

If we go with Instagram worldview, I think it’s going to change the way we look at how to take vertical photos.
Because the number of information people see in a vertical or horizontal photo as a percentage of the screen on their phone is twice as different as it is in a horizontal image.

But there are still very few architects who post vertical photos. This is because most of the stock photos that I try to upload are in the horizontal position.
I haven’t posted horizontal photos on Instagram since a specific point in time. Even horizontal stock photos are cropped and either square or vertical.

─ What do you consider in what you post?

Ashizawa: I think it’s important to communicate our office’s attitude on Instagram, so I think it’s essential to present the right mix of furniture, interior design, and architecture.

Around March 11, when Ishinomaki Laboratory, which I’m involved with, celebrated its ninth anniversary, we did a feature on the furniture that we designed at Ishinomaki Laboratory. It’s a bit like a magazine.

The most popular section is in residential interiors. There’s a sense of intimacy for our readers. I do put up some travel photos and stuff, but it’s not very popular.

A lot of people who look at Instagram want to mimic the style.
So they are very responsive to space photos that they can imitate. If it’s a very sharp space or something like that, people will think, “I can’t do this,” or that “I don’t want it to be different.”

Maybe that’s why people appreciate rooms in apartment buildings that express a lifestyle rather than spaces that are rather cluttered.

That said, I didn’t re-shoot the photos of the space for Instagram.
They were initially taken about six months after we took delivery and lived in the house. I don’t take so-called completion photos that don’t have any furniture or anything else in them.

If we wanted to take pictures of the interior, we would have to include a stylist.
I don’t think it’s something we should go that far.

─ Does Instagram ever lead to work?

Ashizawa: I’m not sure. Directly, I don’t know.
But most people who want to be interns contact me on Instagram. The same is true for interns from overseas. In that sense, it’s beneficial for job opportunities.

For those who are interested, it’s becoming more common to look at the person or firm’s Instagram account first.
I believe that in the future when a design firm is selected for a project of any kind, there’s a good chance that they will see Instagram.

For example, instead of a website link in an email or message, they’ll paste the Instagram account in an email or message and say, “I’m thinking of working with this person, what do you think?.”
As I said earlier, it’s easy to compare and see what kind of work we’re doing in the same format.

Lately, we’ve been using these Instagram properties to make our presentations.
When we designed and proposed a hotel room, we set up a so-called persona: “Who will use this place?
At that point, we built up the following material. ‘A guest wrote this kind of book, lived in this kind of house, in this kind of office. His wife runs a shop like this. Here’s what his Instagram looks like”.

Your Instagram timeline (feed) is a perfect persona, you know. It’s hard to tell what the couple’s age or income is as a persona.

We even assume the user’s Instagram, which leads us to suggest, “This is the kind of aesthetic person who stays at this hotel, so we should make sure space is like this.”

I recently realized that Instagram is about branding yourself.
I wouldn’t say it’s the person itself, but it’s a lot about who they are and what they are supposed to be.

─ I’m surprised that you’ve thought that far ahead. Did you change your profile picture recently because you were conscious of the way you look?

Ashizawa: Profile pictures… I think that a designer’s profile picture should be age-appropriate. Otherwise, when you meet them, they will say, “Oh? ” (laughs).
Later, people would talk about it, you know. They’d say, “That guy’s picture was a long time ago.” That’s not a compliment, you know.

It’s because your profile picture shows what you want people to think of you. You have to change your profile picture every year or two. Of course, it’s a hassle, so many people don’t do that much.
You can see your sincerity in your profile picture, I’m sure.

(Continued on #04 Architects must be unique)