When I was visiting Paris during summer break in college, I found a French book that had kitschy, giant red Japanese lettering that read "KARITE" on the cover, along with the words "L'EMPIRE DES OBJECTS".

"KARITE" is the Japanese phonetic appropriation of the French word qualité, or quality, in English, a term used frequently in Japanese pop culture. The book was about every day Japanese objects that represented quality.

The coffee table style book showed 72 Japanese objects, ranging from the expected (Le Sushi), to the strangely generic object like a slipper (Les Mules). The slipper is completely plain in its plasticity and flatness, and to most people in the world it would look like 'just' a slipper, yet it's distinctly Japanese. It's one of those things you always see in hotels, restaurants and bathrooms that require you to take your shoes off—the kind I would slip on after I had set my sneakers neatly together, as instructed by my mother; the kind you wear knowing that millions before you had worn them, and you're glad to be wearing socks.



Within the pages of the book, each generic object becomes an iconic one, isolated from its environment and surrounded by French words that bring new meaning to it. I am able to feel that slipper under my foot, while realizing that this slipper may look and feel different to other people around the world.

This book reminds me that, like language, design is at once specific to a culture, yet universal to the world. One can take disparate elements and arrange it thoughtfully in the universal language of design, framing a context and bringing unexpected meaning to the ordinary.

karitemix.com showcases my design work that is on one hand commerically driven by client needs and the marketing landscape. On the other hand, it reflects what I enjoy most about my job as a designer: to interpret another person's product, event, or idea, and to present and communicate it as something of great quality—because a slipper is never just a slipper.