There are images that remain, more than others, etched in memory. When, for example, the master took the map of the city of Tokyo, folded according to the Koryo Miura fold, a brilliant Japanese engineer, and with a simple gesture opened and closed it: “look at the simplicity and beauty,” he said, “that which is born from intuition and precision.”
Isao, the master, left us after a long illness that had extinguished the child that stirred within him.
ISAO is the anagram of OASI: indeed, every time I met him, it was a bit like finding nourishment and refreshment in the desert of nothingness, the mundane, the monotony. I learned a lot from him when, together with him and Lorenzo Palmeri, invited by Sabastiano Bagnara, we held a course in Siena, at Communication Sciences, in the halls of the Renaissance cloisters or in a fantastic (and unsettling) natural science museum.
Isao is the engineer of airplanes, an expert in fluid dynamics: the knowledge of fluids probably gave him the lightness with which he hopped around holding a Japanese brush in his hands, a means of vision. He would tell me: “look at the air… it moves in circular motions, never in a straight line” and he pointed out the corners of his studio to me, showing me that they were cleaner because the circular motion of the air couldn’t dirty them, it couldn’t reach them…
Isao is the one of the nomadic civilization, far more promising than the sedentary one, because it is accustomed to change, to mobility – both physical and mental – to lightness (a fundamental condition for being able to move), where beauty is synonymous with extreme functionality, creative invention, and research.
Isao quoted Huizinga and his homo ludens, because – he said – man learns through play and therefore it is necessary to preserve the conditions and processes of play throughout his life, at home as in the office, in everyday life as in extraordinary moments. Concepts that he transferred into his objects: a memorable workshop at Domus on “domesticity in the office” that would lead him to work in a sector to which he would give an extraordinary innovative push, collaborating with Italian, American, and Japanese companies, until making play a driving force of motivation for the individual and organizations, making this dimension tangible thanks to the vision of an enlightened entrepreneur Enrico Loccioni.
And what about behavioral energy: objects promote habits and behaviors of those who will use them. Objects are media of conversation and socialization. He sometimes laughed at how such behaviors were actually “discoveries” of the user, a serendipity for which he was not responsible, like that time when a lady told him that, yes, it was brilliant to make the lid of Serafino Zani’s coffee maker flat, so she could place the cup upside down on it while the coffee gurgled below and thus warm it to enjoy it better. He laughed at this, he was happy that his was, in the end, a narrative open to interpretation, even “behavioral,” of his potential interlocutor.
From him, I learned that the designer must be a Trickster, literally a trickster. Then I found that idea in the description that Vilem Flusser makes of design (and the designer), associating it with deception and fraud: design is a way to “deceptively emancipate ourselves from our limited natural conditions.” To trick our limits, in short. For Isao, the Trickster was also that character outside social conventions, capable of seeing things in a different way, with childlike naivety and without mincing words. The court jester who was able to connect the center of power and the periphery of common people. To say unpleasant things without fear of being lynched in public, capable of making the king naked, of arguing with rhetorical sophistication, with metaphors and images, with flights of fancy and popular vulgarities. A lucid madman, more aware than others of the limits (because design is the science of limits) of the human condition, yet ironic and proactive.
Isao had interpreted with extraordinary talent the Italian model of design, the storytelling that has always accompanied our design process. I remember his memories of meetings with Ponti and Rosselli, for example the “removing flesh” of the master from the profile of the Pirelli skyscraper. One day he told me about the story of that phone, designed for a well-known German appliance company, which he was supposed to present and couldn’t because, upon arriving at the station in Germany, he was robbed of all the drawings. It was a competition of ideas and he presented himself anyway. When it was his turn, without the studio renderings, he simply drew with a Japanese brush the circular shape of that phone. He did it on a sheet, placed on the table, which intercepted a ray of light, rare at those latitudes, filtering through a window and that supported the “story” of what he wanted to propose to them.
Of course, he won, for the power of the narrative, for the emotion he had communicated, for having grasped – as an element of meaning of his proposal – the passion of the Germanic peoples for the warmth and light of the sun.

We should see ourselves in men like Hosoe, to understand something more about ourselves, our culture, our traditions, our passions. With his eyes, today, we understand something more about this wonderful human adventure that is design.