WarkaWater towers harvest water from air–up to 25 gallons each, daily–and are set to be installed in the Ethiopian desert hills by 2015. The towers, named after the disappearing Ethiopian Warka tree, were designed by Arturo Vittori of Architecture and Vision.

The 30-foot (9 m) tall, 88-pound vase-shaped towers have two main parts. The semi-rigid exoskeleton is a weave of of lightweight juncas or bamboo stalks. The internal plastic mesh, similar to the bags oranges are sold in, hangs inside the tower, collecting condensation on a nylon and polypropylene scaffold.

The towers cost $550 and can be built in a week by a four-person team with local materials. Although designed with parametric computing–the parabolic modelling technique used in WarkaWater design was learned by Vittori while working on aircraft interiors and solar powered cars–Vittori said, “Once locals have the necessary know how, they will be able to teach others villages and communities to build the WarkaWater towers.”

The towers can collect 25 gallons of water daily, and work best in the radically changing temperature fluctuations between the desert’s days and nights.

The familiar water solution of digging wells is not viable in the rocky hills and plateaus of Ethiopia, where deep drilling–as well as the pumps and pump power necessary–is expensive.

Forty billion hours are spent collecting water by sub-Saharan Africans annually, according to UN estimates. This water is not always safe to drink.

Water shortage is a global problem, affecting an estimated 1 billion people in Africa alone. Approximately 3.4 million people die annually from water-related diseases–1,400 children under age five daily.

Vittori hopes to have two WarkaWater towers working in Ethiopia–where only 21 percent of the population has access to proper sanitation–by 2015. Vittoli hopes the time freed up that would have been used for collecting water will liberate Ethiopians from the cycle of dependence and poverty. It is proposed that WarkaWater towers could provide hydration for the 1 billion people who do not have access to safe drinking water. Vittori is seeking funding to mass-produce and distribute the towers. Increased production would also bring down the $550 dollar price tag.

Architecture and Vision

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“There was no need to change. It’s been around for 45 years,” said designer Massimo Vignelli, famous for his work on corporate identies in the 60s and 70s, who died May 27. The statement was made in response to the 2013 replacement of one of his most famous works, the logo for American Airlines–the red and blue “AA.”

The logo was created by the design team of Lella and Massimo Vignelli, who together had worked as the Vignelli Office of Design and Architecture in Milan since 1960.

“Every other airline has changed its logo many times, and every time was worse than the previous one. Fifty years ago there were very few logos in general. Somebody started to do logos and people started thinking that logos were important, and now there is a plethora and so many don’t make sense. You see the pages of the sponsors of a concert or an exhibition, and at the bottom there are 50 different logos. It’s ridiculous. A word is so much better.”

The “AA” logo was used for almost half a century–from 1967 until 2013, when it was replaced by a new, “patriotic” paint job. The “AA” was painted on the tail of the old “Silver Bird,” which featured red, white and blue horizontal stripes and the joined word “AmericanAirlines” in Helvetica above a polished aluminum fuselage. The new design has the jets painted solid white body with an American flag-tail and the word “American.”

Of the new design, which was designed by FutureBrand, Vignelli said, “It has no sense of permanence. The American flag is great. I’m designing a logo now for a German company, and I’m using black, red, gold, and yellow. Why? Because national colors have a tremendous equity. They’re much more memorable. It rings the bell of identification. But the American flag has 13 stripes, right? Not 11. Did American add only 11 stripes [to the flag on the tail] because they are in Chapter 11? I don’t think two more stripes would have been a disaster. And there are only two colors shown instead of all three. So is it a different flag?”

Vignelli also said of the paintjob, “As you know, one of the great things about American Airlines was that the planes were unpainted. The paint adds so much weight that that brings an incredible amount of fuel consumption. For some reason they decided to paint the plane. The fact is, weight is weight.”

Choice of font was important in Vignelli’s design. “Legibility … is a very important element of an airplane. So we used Helvetica, which was brand new at the time. And we wanted to make one word of American Airlines, half red and half blue. What could be more American than that? And there were no other logos then that were two colors of the same word. We took the space away, made one word, and split it again by color. It looked great. The typeface was great. We proceeded by logic, not emotion. Not trends and fashions.”

Of the change, Vignelli said, “Now they have something other than Helvetica that’s not as good or as powerful. Then they did a funny thing: Some may see an eagle [next to it], some may see something else. And they don’t even say it’s the eagle—they say it could be the eagle.”

The plane that featured Vignelli’s design also bore an eagle, but the design team refused to design the eagle for American. “When we originally designed the logo, I designed without the eagle. They wanted an eagle. I said, ‘If you want an eagle, it has to have every feather.’ You don’t stylize and make a cartoon out of an eagle. Somebody else did the eagle, by the way.”

To the question of American Airlines recent bankruptcy and it’s undergoing rebranding, as well as courting a merger with U.S. Airlines, Vignelli said the effort, unless there is a substanial change in the running of the company, is “a wolf camouflaged by sheep.”

Vignelli also made broader statements about his personal design aesthetics during his lifetime. “I like design to be semantically correct, syntactically consistent, and pragmatically understandable. I like it to be visually powerful, intellectually elegant, and above all timeless.”

“Design is a profession that takes care of everything around us,. Politicians take care of the nation and fix things — at least they are supposed to. Architects take care of buildings. Designers take care of everything around us. Everything that is around us, this table, this chair, this lamp, this pen has been designed. All of these things, everything has been designed by somebody.”

“I love my work because ‘design is one.’ It’s one profession, one attitude. As Italians, we have a long history of codifying design in this way. It has existed for centuries. It was the same for Leonardo da Vinci. In Italy, after the war, we had to do everything … architects like myself did everything … The discipline was thesame. The way of thinking, coming up with solutions, was always the same. The mental process was the same and the mental process was discipline.”

“I think that it is my responsibility to make the work better than it is.”

“The life of a designer is a life of fight—fight against ugliness,” Massimo Vignelli said in the 2007 documentary “Helvetica.”

“Yes, my style is minimalist. Every language has its rules, everyone has his own style and rules, and that’s why every house is different. My style is more minimalist. You need to take away, take away until there is something left.”

“Design is much more profound. Styling is very much emotional. Good design isn’t—it’s good forever. It’s part of our environment and culture. There’s no need to change it. The logo doesn’t need change. The whole world knows it, and there’s a tremendous equity. It’s incredibly important on brand recognition. I will not be here to make a bet, but this [new logo] won’t last another 25 years.”

Vignelli

FutureBrand

American Airlines

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This is the second installment in the Art of Design series.

Joseph Grima, editor-in-chief of Domus magazine, recently commented on the state of design in Italy–a country with a long design tradition and which has undergone a prolonged crisis, saying that “an era is drawing to an end for Italian design,” and “a new idea will be born.” Grima’s words on the current state and future of Italian furniture design showed a strong vestment in cultural tradition and an understanding of the influence of the system that surrounds designers.

“I think crisis can engender nostalgia, especially when it’s so protracted,” Grima said. Grima spoke of a new idea that will be born, and the hope for such an idea in the contemporary Italian design world. “Something new will emerge,” he said.

As to how this new thing wound enter Italian furniture design, Grima said, “Some hope that new technologies will bring that era in. The digital technologies that we talked a lot about last year, they lend themselves also to being combined with traditional knowledges  regarding materials, the kind of craft–hands-on skills of the artisans that exist in this region and are unrivaled anywhere else.

Grima made his comments in relation to the annual show at the Triennale, where a wide range of Italian designers present.

“I think it’s interesting that at the Triennale the annual design museum exhibition is very much on the theme of the great masters and the past and Italian design almost searching for comfort in its own history, and Italy trying to remind itself that there is something there,” said Grima.

“I think everybody realizes that possibly an era is drawing to an end and a new era is beginning.”

I think some manufacturers are really seriously beginning to think about how they can engage a completely different model of design industry.”

Grima spoke of a distinction between the Italian design tradition and the tradition currently experiencing favor, citing relatively prosperous London. “The great tradition that was born here was not born from the tradition of schools. It’s actually the direct contact between the masters and the craftsmen. It’s almost an apprenticeship model, which is something really, really different from the London model, for example. That’s something that now is in a little bit of a crisis because it’s something that’s not as easy to perpetuate, and the world has moved a little bit more towards being aligned with the schools model.”

Of London, where wealth gained through financial services has been replaced by fast-growing, digital community, Grima said, “I think the reason that that’s sprung up in London is a direct consequence of London being one of the great education centers of the world. It’s got some of the best universities and the best schools.”

Grima did not think the state of Italy was conductive to design innovation. “I think there’s a lot of uncertainty, and the political model of course is not encouraging,” he said

Of the system, Grima said, “It can [move forward with the times]. It’s not a system that is predisposed to naturally move in that direction, and it’s one of the paradoxes of Italy that on the one hand it’s completely–it’s one of the most innovative, creative countries in the world, indisputably. On the other hand, the culture of bureaucracy, the actual framework–the mental framework, the bureaucratic framework, the economic framework of the nation–is, actually, one would be forgiven for actually thinking that it had been designed to suppress any sort of creative, vital energy of creating something new. It’s really–some aspects of it are really beyond belief.

Finally, of the current situation in which Italy is importing designers from around the world, and in which great designers are not living in the country, Grima said,  “I don’t think it necessarily matters, because I don’t think you can expect to survive by perpetuating the past, and I think Milan still has an undisputed role as the design capital of the world, and as long as it is able to look out to the world and kind of capture, and be the arbiter in a way of what is interesting and what is innovative in the design world, that’s something that can be equally as important as being simply the product of a lot of small countries.”

Domus

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Tie Dye is an art–or a composition of several arts–of much variation. Tie dying creates images geometric, random or representational, and chance also contributes to the result. The artisan or artist shapes the work to a chosen degree, but human control cannot be absolute.

Tie dying originates in 8th century Japan and Indonesia with Shirabori (a Japanese word referring to an object wrung, squeezed or pressed). Shirabori encompasses a wide variety of resist-dying techniques.

From Japan’s many shirabori techniques, two were employed internationally. In Malaysia and Indonesia, plangi was picked up–a technique of gathering and binding cloth–as well as tritik, a stitch resist textile painting process. In India, bandhani was and is a process of plucking and binding cloth in small points.

Various cultures have used resist dying for at least 6000 years–in now-Columbia, Peru, the Silk Road, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, although most of this was dying of threads before sewing, which could not be considered tie dying.

Dying was done using berries, lichen, flowers, shrubs, vegetables, nuts and other natural dies on plant fibers from cotton, hemp and rayon and animal fibers like wool, depending on the materials available in the region.

In the U.S. in the 1920s, directions were given on how to decorate homes and clothing using tie dye (for more example of tie dying in the 1920s, click here).

Tie dye was picked up again in the 1960s by the hippie movement, who wore tie dye clothes and decorated their houses, vehicles and album covers with tie dye patterns. To see actual video footage of the first hippie tie dye experience, on an acid trip at a river along the trip taken by the Bus Further, click here.

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As shown in the recent documentary “Magic Trip,” “tie dye” was invented in 1964 on the trip taken by the Merry Pranksters across America, and the actual moment of innocent creation was filmed by the crew of what would become known as the first hippies–although at the time there was no word for what they were except the names they gave themselves. Driving through the Arizona desert, the bus was searching for “The Cool Place” when Neil Cassady, the driver of the bus, veered off the road toward a small pond and got the bus stuck in the muddy sand.

Because they would be stuck for a while, waiting for their messenger to ride a motorbike into town for assistance, Kesey wanted to take LSD. The acid was mixed into a jar of orange juice and passed around for everyone to take a drink. The movie cameras that had been brought along to document the trip were set up in various spots around the river as the Pranksters started to wade into the pond.

Sometime into the trip, Kesey decided he wanted to see what it would be like to pour bright colored model paint into a small arm of the pond. The varicolored paints floated and marbleized. The pranksters put Zonker’s white t-shirt in the water under the paint and lifted it up, “and invented tie dye.”

The narration of the pond trip includes a presentation of the setting not done justice to in the short clip. To watch the video, which unlike any other document gives a real live-action quasi-experience to the times of the first hippies–and for the first time, because the hundreds of hours of tape collected on the trip was out-of-sync with the recorded audio and could not be edited until the advent of recent editing technology–click on the bus—->

For those curious about the history of tie die before the 60s–it dates back to 8th century Japan and was even popularized in America in th 1920s–click here.

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MIA self-directed the music video for her latest release, “Double Bubble Trouble,” in which attractive, customized 3-D printed guns in various shapes and sizes owned and shared by young people and neon peace-sign drones hover over groups of girl dancers.

The video also flashes an infomercial of 3-D printing guns, 1984, groups of teen boys being made out with by blonde teen girls in a row, rape rings, fashion, flashing images, helmet cams, sweat-pants room-dancers, fish-tank bongs, smiling-face Niqab, Japanese kanji, tattoos, e-cigarettes, gun-flashing and gun-pointing, American military-style drones, picture-in-picture, “YES WE CAN,” pop tags, security cameras, ying-yangs, parrots with neon guns, monkeys, and grills.

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Lorenzo Ghiberti, sculptor and first art historian of the Renaissance, wrote in his Commentaries about ancient and modern art and on the new birth of painting in the hand of the young Giotto, who was found by the painter and mosaicist Cimabue as a child on a roadside drawing sheep on a stone slab.

Ghiberti wrote of the time in which Giotto was born. Painting as an art–all its hereditary lines of technique and appreciation–had been extinguished 1000 years earlier, and the dark ages had passed between. In the dark ages through to the Gothic period what painting survives was done by artisans. The examples of painting and sculpture–most notably Greeks and Romans–did not exist for Europeans. Ghiberti writes:

And so in the days of Emperor Constantine and Pope Sylvester the Christian faith gained the upper hand. Idolatry suffered so fierce a persecution that all the statues and paintings, which had long been famous and venerated, were smashed and torn to pieces. And the volumes, treatises, drawings, and precepts which had been used for training men in these great, noble, and gentle arts also perished with the statues and pictures. And in order to do away with every ancient idolatrous custom, it was enacted that churches should be white throughout. At the same time very severe punishments were decreed for anyone who should make any statue or picture; and so the arts of sculpture and painting and all doctrine concerning them came to an end. Once art had ended, the churches stayed white for about six hundred years.

The art of painting started again very feebly among the Greeks, who produced some very rude works. But the Greeks of this age were as coarse and rude as the ancient Greeks were skilled. This was 382 Olympiads from the founding of Rome.

Those making their way in art in Europe in Ghiberti’s time had few examples of past art to look to, but when they did see the work done in other times–such as a 2nd century BC statue from the Roman Empire–they marveled at the difference between what was done then and contemporarily:

I have also observed in a temperate light works carved most perfectly and executed with the greatest art and diligence. Among which, I saw in Rome in the 440th Olympiad a statue of an hermaphrodite the size of a thirteen-year-old girl, which was wrought with wonderful skill.

It had been discovered at that time in a sewer about eight braccia below the ground. The sculpture lay at the level of the vault of the sewer and was covered with earth up to the surface of the street. While the area was being cleared—it was above St. Celsus—a sculptor stopped by, had the statue hauled out, and brought to Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, where he was working at the monument of a cardinal—he had removed some marble from it — the better to transport it to our city. As for the ancient statue, our tongues cannot express the skill, the art, the mastery, the perfection with which it was done. The figure was represented as lying upon spaded soil. On this soil a linen sheet was spread. The figure lay upon this sheet and was uncovered so as to exhibit both the virile and the feminine parts. The arms rested on the ground and were folded. The hands were joined. One of the legs was stretched and had caught the sheet with the big toe. In this act of pulling the sheet it showed wonderful art. The head was missing, but the rest was complete. This statue had very many refinements, which the eye could not perceive, but the hand could detect by touch. (Sleeping Hermaphroditus image)

Ghiberti writes of the time in which Giotto was born,

The art of painting began to flourish again in a village called Vespignano, not far from the city of Florence. There a boy of wonderful talent was born, who one day was copying a sheep from the life. Cimabue the painter, passing by on the road to Bologna, saw him sitting on the ground and drawing the sheep on a slab of stone. He was filled with admiration for the child who at an age so tender was working so well. And reflecting that he must have owed such skill to natural talent, he asked him his name. The boy replied: “My name is Giotto. My father’s name is Bondone, and he lives near here, in yonder house.” Cimabue, remarking the boy’s agreeable personality, went with him to his father, whom he asked permission to take Giotto with him. The father was very poor and granted the painter’s request.

Thus Giotto became a pupil of Cimabue, who then was painting in the Greek style and in that style had earned very great fame in Tuscany. Giotto became great in the art of painting. He introduced the new art. He abandoned the rudeness of the Greeks. He attained the very first rank among the Tuscan painters. And he executed some truly excellent works, especially in the city of Florence, and also in many other places. He had many pupils, all as skilled as the ancient Greeks. Giotto saw in art what others had not attained. He introduced natural art and refinement with it, never departing from the correct proportions. He was very skilled in every branch of art, inventing or discovering all this doctrine, which had remained buried for about six hundred years. When nature wants to grant something, she grants it without stint.

His works were plentiful in every kind of technique. He worked in fresco on walls; he worked in oil; he worked on wood. He executed in mosaic the Ship in St. Peter’s in Rome, and he painted with his own hand the choir and the altarpiece in the same church. (image of the Navicella)

Giotto’s discoverer and patron, Cimabue, was already leaving the Byzantine style under which he was trained, and bore traces of the nascent trend toward naturalism which was a part of the Italian Renaissance that was eventually to smother the older style. Cimabue was partly, it is thought, influenced by Giotto, and Cimabue became seen as the last of the old era, while his pupil became the father of the new: “Giotto truly eclipsed Cimabue’s fame just as a great light eclipses a much smaller one,” were the words of the historian Vasari.

Dante–who was contemporary with Giotto and who described the father of Giotto’s banker patron, Enrico Scrovegni, in the 7th level of hell–eulogized Cimabue and the old art in his Divine Comedy,

O vanity of human powers,
how briefly lasts the crowning green of glory,
unless an age of darkness follows!
In painting Cimabue thought he held the field
but now it’s Giotto has the cry,
so that the other’s fame is dimmed. (Purgatorio XI)

Boccaccio, a friend, also wrote of Giotto in his Decameron, set during the Bubonic and pneumonic plague that killed 30-80 percent of Europe just after Giotto’s death,

The other was Giotto, whose genius was of such excellence that with his art and brush or crayon he painted anything in Nature, the mother and mover of all things under the perpetual turning of the heavens, and painted them so like that they seemed not so much likenesses as the things in themselves; whereby it often happened that men’s visual sense was deceived, and they thought that to be real which was only painted

Now he who brought back to light that art which for many centuries had lain buried under errors (and thus was more fitted to please the eyes of the ignorant than the minds of the wise), may rightly be called one of the shining lights of Florentine glory.  (6th Day, 5th Tale)

Villani, a contemporary and a historian, wrote of Giotto, who painted the Santa Croce Basilica within the chapel owned by the Peruzzi bankers, employers of Villani, Cimabue and Giotto. In his Chronicle, Villani takes us to the building of a new bell tower in the city.

In the said year [1334], on July 18, was begun the new bell tower of Santa Reparata [now Santa Maria del Fiore] close to the front of the church on the piazza of San Giovanni. And there were present for the blessing of the first stone the bishop of Florence with all his clergy as well as the priors and the other magistrates with many people and a great procession. And the foundation was made as solid as possible. And as superintendent and overseer of the opera of Santa Reparata the commune appointed our fellow-citizen, Giotto (working on the basilica from 1313), the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew his figures and their postures according to nature. And he was given a salary by the commune in virtue of his talent and excellence.

Vasari, a chief documentarian of the Renaissance, for whom Michelangelo was the peak, wrote of Cimabue and Giotto as the beginnings of the Renaissance. Cimabue first artist Vasari talks about, marking the first steps into Renaissance, and Giotto, the historian writes, “pulled art out of the darkness” of the medieval, although the changes employed by Giotto did not take a real hold for another hundred years.

For further perspective, take a look at a comparison between Cimabue and Giotto, a compilation of pre-Giotto painting (the paintings are from the fourth to the 13th centuries, although there is no difference), and a compilation of Roman paintings (mostly funerary portraits and decorative paintings from Pompeii), which show an older style of Roman painting, which looks more like that practiced by Giotto.

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Masazumi Imai, the designer of Fujifilm’s X-series cameras, spoke recently about his philosophy and techniques working on the X-T1, which consider heavily the relationship between progression and tradition in design.

“If I want to play my favorite song, I want to choose my favorite guitar,” said Imai in a recent interview, in which he discussed the X-T1. “It’s the same with cameras. If I want to take a photograph of something important to me, I want to choose a special product.”

“Our X design is classic and authentic. I could have chosen an ergonomic style but our X design is completely different. It’s flat and straight and based on ‘good-old-days’ camera style.”

“Late ’70s to ’80s SLRs were very cool to me. The ST901 was very small with a very characteristic finder, so this was very close to the X-T1 concept. Very simple, not so ergonomic — this was the basic inspiration.”

Imai also spoke about the functional aspect of the camera while designing. “Cameras are capturing machines,” said Imai, “but they also express peoples’ minds.”

The question of the return of the center-mounted viewfinder hump, which Imai said was a physical necessity as much as anything else, caused Imai to relate, “We really wanted to break through the barrier of the viewfinder. The EVF is always regarded as something inferior to the OVF, but we really wanted to change that perception.”

Of the X-series’ dial-heavy control scheme, which Fujifilm believes is a more efficient and enjoyable way to shoot than the abstracted, context-sensitive wheels used by most competitors, Imai said, “The X series is a new combination, the dials and digital. At first, film cameras with dials were common, then it changed to PASM with automatic cameras. Next came digital cameras with PASM that were also automatic. But now, we should be coming back to the standard.”

Imai traced the design shift back to 1985 and Minolta’s Alpha 7000 camera, the first use autofocus and automatic film advance, which designers compare to the shift in automobiles transmission toward automatic.

Imai designed the camera not for everyone. As is expressed on the Finepix X-100 website, “Beyond the praise of a million people, we wanted to design a camera that would be loved by 100,000.”

Imai said, “These are cameras designed to be used manually by people who know what each physical control is for; there are no automatic sports or portrait modes as found on almost all competing models. Nowadays we don’t need special technique, the camera does everything. We think we should go back to basics. The photographer can control the camera, the camera doesn’t control the photographer.”

Imai talked about the question of pleasing everyone. “Basically we asked a lot of professional photographers, and if we asked a hundred people, we’d probably get a hundred different answers. Maybe in the future we can provide some kind of a service where the customer can come to our support center and we can customize that sort of thing. Because there is no perfect answer.”

A few design mistakes in the X-T1 were commented on by the designer. The buttons on the back of the camera, flush with the body and bearing little tactile response, Imai said were so designed partly because of the camera’s weather-sealing, and partly because raised buttons can be susceptible to accidental presses. “But it is a little difficult to control — especially the focus point. For example, the movie button — many customers say that this is too easy to press. So that is the kind of thing that we should improve as soon as possible.”

The consideration of the experience of the camera as a familiar and understood tool, or “metaphor”–as it is described on the Finepix site–is something Imai has commented on before. When asked about the Sony RX1 in 2012, Imai said “I think many customers want a bigger sensor with first rate design. Sony’s answer is the RX1. Of course, I like that kind of camera but it is completely different to our series because the design is too modern.‘

On the Finepix X100 site, Imai’s design philosophy is described personally: “We wanted to communicate both the nostalgic ‘vintage’ feeling of the exterior and the authentic cutting-edge qualities inside the camera.”

“The aim of the product design team is to inspire people to identify with the product and encourage them to enjoy using it. In the case of the X100, I drew on my own personal experience and tried to imagine how people felt when they first encountered a camera – the sensation when they held it and felt the first stirring of the desire to frame and shoot a photo, and then I aimed to translate this comfortable intimacy inherent to a camera into a concrete design.”

It is a philosophy expressed by others on the X-100 team. “At a glance, anyone knows it’s a tool for taking photos,” according to Kazuhisa Horikiri Design Manager at the X-100 Design Centre. “Anyone who sees it, immediately associates it with capturing high-quality photos.’ The transformation of impressions such as these into a concrete form is where the design team started.”

The design team spent time considering every detail of the camera. One of the most concerning choices was that between real and synthetic leather. “Right up to the end of the design process, the team agonised over the choice between the experience when the material is displayed or touched versus the functionality of long-term use, but on final analysis, the priority on the concept of the camera as ‘a tool for taking photos’ determined the selection of the high practicality of synthetic leather.”

The design team set out to create a question with a question asked at the outset: “What kind of camera would we really want to own?’ The answer was a design that not only meshed with every one of our senses; from the manual operating systems of the viewfinder and other functions to the feel of the body materials, but one that also put a priority on fine details that accented its true nature as a camera and its comfort as a tool.”

“Our aim has been not to find a generic standard that would appeal to any person around the world, but to focus on people for whom the camera held a special place in their hearts and evoked strong feelings, and to appreciate the lifestyle and the word spread by the owners of such a camera. We have put importance on the interaction (communication) that occurs between the camera and people when they pick a camera up and hold it to their eye, when they operate the aperture ring and dials, when they hear the sound of the shutter, or when it is just adorning a shelf. At such a moment, I am certain that your own unique ‘X100 Story’ will begin.”

Sources:

Finepix X-100

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