Kenjiro Kirton on How Design Doesn’t (Only) Happen at a Desk

0:00From the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, this is the DesignThinkers Podcast. DesignThinkers is Canada's largest graphic design conference. Originally launched to mark the conference's 25th anniversary, the podcast now reaches a global audience of designers and creatives. Join our host and RGG president, Nicola Hamilton, as she connects with DesignThinkers speakers to explore the work and ideas shaping today's design industry. This week on the Design Thinkers Podcast, I'm joined by Ken Hero-Curtain. Ken is co-founder and creative director at Hado, the London and Hong Kong-based publishing house, design studio, and concept store known for its playful, research-driven approach to cultural projects, branding, and digital experiences.

0:45Ken's work moves fluidly between publishing, interaction, retail, and storytelling, and often blurs the lines between design practice and everyday life. In this conversation, we talk about what happens when design escapes the boundaries of the studio, when research becomes fiction writing, when process becomes play, and when creative practice becomes something lived rather than something produced. We also get into the value of iteration and experimentation, talk about the similarities between cooking and design, about building participatory creative communities, and why some of the most meaningful creative work actually happens in the soft edges between disciplines.

1:20This episode is for designers who are interested in expanding everything design and the design studio can be. I was reading your talk description in preparation for this, and it sounds like you're sort of working on this more expansive idea of what having a design practice could be. So I think that's kind of fun. I'm excited to hear what that means or how that's taking shape for you and Aido. Yeah, yes. Still working that out and trying to get through it. But yeah, I guess, you know, like everyone, with everything's happening politically, globally, there's a lot of questions around identity and purpose.

1:58And I guess for us, it's a lot of questions that we've had. Over the past few years, the practice has had to evolve a lot in terms of how it operates and its structure. But I think we feel quite confident in this sort of realization that it's really like exploring crafts and arts and pushing ourselves outside of the physical studio space, kind of really branching out, looking at other forms of creative practice from contemporary dance to spoken word and just experiencing these things and going out to libraries and archives and essentially finding things that aren't digitized and kind of just pulling our practice of research and exploration outside of what's on the internet, which essentially is kind of inflated echo chambers.

2:48So I think it's been quite a nice thing. It's stuff that we've always done, but kind of proactively doing this even more so now. Yeah. No, when you first started talking there, I was like, well, this is always what Haydo has been about craft in that way. But yeah, to be thinking about it a bit more intentionally. When you say we, what does the team look like right now? I guess we're still quite lean. I think we've always kept it that way. It allows us to kind of be quite selective on projects, but also kind of to scale up with people who are really experts in those fields. We have like a team in London and a team in Hong Kong and largely built up with designers.

3:27I guess what's different is that we have publishing as well as part of our practice. So production and publishing managers, art director and so forth. It's a slightly different offering and our physical studio is quite different in the sense that we have a studio space. and it's on it's in the Barbican area in London but it has like a front of front space right on the on the high street um so we're like sandwiched between a local dentist and a bagel shop it's quite nice to kind of be to be around just different sort of industries yeah I walked by the last time I was in London but no one was there while I was walking by but but then it means that you know we have like this front front space which is open for bookings and appointments and then downstairs we have a printing press so I guess like traditional studio models I guess are like interior might be meeting rooms in a chill out area ours is quite quite a different dynamic so I think also trying to get the rest of the team kind of going downstairs and trialing things out through the print process and just just getting just trying different processes to kind of create new perspectives I want to stay on this idea of not being a traditional design studio for a second because yeah it's so it sounds like right now publishing printing digital sort of community building are all things is the retail store still open or is that yeah i mean we opened our retail outlets probably the worst time of the century so like the day before lockdown happened but we survived really well is is really great i think the area that we were in it started to become a bit more of like a commercial high street so like brands like Coffs and Uniqlo started to crop in and we kind of felt that it wasn't really it was no longer for us really so then we made the decision to move it to this our new studio which does have it does have this like front of space and we're sort of learning what that means because it's not a the Barbican area isn't really like a shopping area or retail area so this year we've decided to do my appointment and that's been really great because effectively we can spend more time with the person that comes.

5:35There's a little bit more of a value exchange through conversation and so forth. And that seems to kind of work with us quite well. Did you set out to build something that was going to be this multidisciplinary or has this sort of evolved over time? Yeah, I think we did. I mean, we're definitely, Jackson and I, we founded it in 2009. We definitely founded the practice because we didn't really see, I guess our version of design was really around like social actions not necessarily around protests but just also just around how design is can be like a social sculpture in terms of like communicating and playing I guess with traditions of graphic designs like the sign and the signifier but into events or workshops or you know physical interactions so the practice has always kind of been driven by this idea of that as well as this concept of a support structure.

6:30So I guess the publishing house is set up as a support structure for the creative community but also local ones. Previously I guess operating a lot as an actual research printing press. So yeah I guess we've always been quite interested in how what design means in society today and as part of that these sort of I guess what you'd call like these multidisciplinary tasks come a part of it. You said something there that was such a beautiful statement. Did you say design as a social sculpture? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's something that we were playing around with a lot in our final year at university. So we actually built, instead of designing posters or brands, we actually designed four evenings at dinner.

7:13We built a dining table, a circular dining table, invited loads of different practitioners. and it was just about creating that set out and obviously the touch points were like traditional graphic design that invites menus and so forth and then we turned that into reality fiction novel it's something that's quite intimate um and that was our first publication that we printed and published i don't think i've ever heard you the design as social sculpture i don't think i've heard those words together it's quite beautiful okay so if someone you meet someone new and they ask you like what is Hato today like how do you describe the business today uh we try to say as simpler as possible uh I guess we do design studio and we do I guess we work with cultural institutes branding campaigns exhibitions publishing and then we have this and we have a publishing house where we work with like artists that we admire yeah but design studio first I think so this is all part of our kind of thinking of everything like what what are we I also really like the idea of thinking the studio as a school.

8:14I mean, play and learning has always been such a huge part to what we do. I think we're obviously interested in production methods and our approach to making an interesting book format is the same as making an interesting digital experience. It comes to prototyping and bringing in that production in early phases of concept and strategy as opposed to like a traditional linear process. So yeah, I guess that notion and learning is really important it kind of means that without each project we take on there's something we're evolving in our own self and that and that and that sort of ensures a sense of autonomy but also a sense that it's not necessarily a service where we're just cookie cutting or or there's templates sort of pre-described yeah i sort of think about i was i was joking before we got into the podcast about how i have many part-time jobs sort of split my time between a bunch of things.

9:08And sometimes trying to decide which hat you're going to show up in in a particular space is hard. Does that definition sort of matter to you? Or is the ambiguity kind of the point? I think ambiguity is a large part of it and being comfortable with that. I think there's this notion of kind of really trying to define everything a little bit too much and having that sort of sense of ambiguity is quite important to us as a practice. I guess from a public and publishing and events side to kind of embrace different ways of thinking and different practices and kind of create a space that that allows for that um and then i guess from a client and i guess we like to work with clients that are want to push boundaries a little bit and you know i think that i guess there's a sense of ambiguity which also extends to being comfortable in the unknown yeah which extends to the output in some way that they don't need to be so attached to what that final output will be exactly and also for us as a as a practice you know just to be comfortable in the unknown is quite a thing to kind of adapt to and and kind of learn from but effectively you know it's just it's largely if it's known and you're in comfort then it's most likely been done before or you've done it before um so kind of trying to always like push ourselves to kind of find that sort of periphery or what that edge or that boundary is.

10:35I mean, the not having done it before and the discomfort of that is such a fascinating thing, especially when you're running all these sort of different businesses, because there is actually benefit to doing a couple of things over and over again, right? Like a piece of advice I got when I was opening this, the retail store opening issues was that like the first year is the hardest because you've done nothing before, like everything you're doing for the first time. And especially when it comes to running events, like the second time you do it, you're like, oh, I can make it so much better. I can make sure that that just works so much better because you now know how it works or know something about it.

11:11Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that's something that we're trying to learn to be comfortable and being comfortable. Well, being comfortable, being uncomfortable. Yeah, I mean, I think I think we're naturally now become comfortable in being uncomfortable in the sense that, you know, we're quite happy in that space. we feel like we're doing our job or that's like our purpose. But then there's definitely benefits of being comfortable in the sense of, you know, knowing what you're doing, kind of rolling it out. But also you kind of need a balance. You need this sort of balance of different types of work that, you know, you can kind of jump into.

11:45And then others that are kind of really stretching and kind of niggle away with you in the evenings and weekends. Well, I think about it as that, like, you know, very cliche, like you have to know the rules before you can break them idea. but like of being able to intentionally pick the place of discomfort on a given project or activation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess for us, I guess there's different projects that have those elements and we're more comfortable pushing ourselves definitely at the beginning. And I think with everyone, you know, you want to push as much as you can in that early concept phase or the aspirations of what you're doing.

12:22And then some realities kick in and it might be feedback or it might be budget or, you know, there's different elements. And I think all of these external elements is what makes a project the project. They're all, you know, every project's unique, just like every person is. And that sort of process allows it to kind of formulate and become its own entity. Yeah. So you mentioned this already, but like play has always been such an important part of your process, of Hato's process, of what we sort of know you for. Or does that often happen at the beginning of the project? Like, is that place for play at the start?

12:57Yeah, I mean, I guess there's a lot of place for exploration. We try to anyway. I mean, obviously, there's a large rhetoric and it's, you know, it's happening and evolving that the time spent on projects is getting smaller and smaller. Expectations are growing higher. And we notice as well, like, although play is such a big part, we don't always get to do it at the beginning. Sometimes you kind of have to jump in. And I guess that's where we're starting to evolve our thinking in what do we do outside of the studio or outside of those hours where it's kind of working in new production techniques or just visiting an archive and allowing those experiences, which are inevitably playful and fun, but can kind of inform our wider practice or our wider knowledge.

13:44so when it does come to those inevitable briefs that are quite short periods that we have a bit more of a pool to kind of pull from yeah i think that makes a lot of sense and i think you're right that the sort of amount of time or the amount of budget attached to projects just sort of feels like it gets smaller and smaller and figuring out how to do it without burning a whole team out yeah probably relies on on figuring out what those moments of play are whether they're part of the project or outside of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. I think we're also enjoying working on, we're trying to find longer scheduled projects.

14:20Because I guess for us, exhibitions have always been quite long. When we work with cultural galleries, we're working on one for the V &A right now, which won't open until I think like mid-2027. So we have, you know, we have quite a lot of time. But even within such a long schedule, there's like realities like procurement budgets So certain things have to be locked in and decided quite early on, just so you can go back and forth with fabricators. We're starting to do like larger scale publications where we're onboarding as editors as well. And that's really nice because obviously through that process, you can kind of formulate or kind of co-formulates the design and the physicality of it in tandem.

15:03And in many ways, it kind of means that we're sort of thinking about design and production well, much earlier at the sort of early phases. So that's been quite, quite enjoyable. Yeah. Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about the sort of publishing part, which has been a core part of Hato's business for the entire time. I mean, I guess you just talked about that sort of graduation project, having a publication attached to it. But I sometimes think about the publishing arm being like, not just about the output for you, but like kind of the way of working feels so tied into publishing in some way. What is it about publishing for you?

15:36I guess it's always been about sort of this idea of disseminating a perspective that we find really interesting. And we want the world to kind of more people to see it and think about that. And I guess we've been quite moved by this sort of statement that art will save us in this sort of period of time. and how I guess within art as a space, it's kind of free and can be political and can kind of evaluate society and so forth and give these sort of statements and new... The idea of art as a mirror to society, yeah. Yeah, and I guess for us, it's always been the sort of core drive is kind of just showcasing being able to back a project and kind of open out.

16:24And it comes from different places. I guess we have our own zines and lo-fi projects where we print ourselves, and that's very much so about taking something like a risograph printer and working with a photographer, an artist that's never used that process, and working initially with their works and then tweaking it. And there's this sort of relationship where it becomes a collaboration with the production method, where the output is kind of like a fusion between what they do and the printing process. And then there's our own projects, which we're sort of backing a little bit more on our own end, like I guess trying to carve out more time, spending more time on that.

17:06And it's Cooking with Scorsese, which is a movie cookbook told through screenshots and subtitles. I think that's one that's quite an early project that we kind of work a lot on. And we'll work on a new cookbook for that, which will launch in the next summertime this year. But it's more of a celebration around the sense of home and more sort of world cinema and so forth. And yeah, I think it's been quite nice to think of that and kind of enabling within this model, trying to enable a model where we can donate a percentage of the proceeds as well. So I guess kind of just exploring how that works.

17:48Right now, we're exploring lots of models within the publishing. Also looking at co-publishing as well. So we have a photography or talent agency that we have been working with for the past three, four years on their rebrand. But they're also wanting to publish with us. We have a publication launching, I think in May this year, on one of their artists. And that's also quite interesting, this idea of co-publishing. So do you see the sort of publishing part of your business expanding in the next little bit? Is that sort of where the experimentation around publishing models is going? Yeah, we hope so.

18:22I mean, I think we have, yeah, we do. And I guess we've kind of been trying to learn from that over the past couple of years and understand what makes sense for us and our audiences and so forth. And what's also sustainable, I guess, is there's a reality within books that we try to sustain the practice. And as everyone who's involved in books or magazines, it's not the most profitable business. It's very much so a labor of love. But we're trying to find a balance that kind of works within that. Well, because I think it's really important, right? I think a lot of the work you've been doing, sort of working with artists or on these sort of more art-leaning projects, like it commits those ideas to the archive in some way, right?

19:04It makes them more permanent, the dissemination of information. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. and you know there's beautiful things like in the uk where each copy has published goes to the library and you know it's accessible to anyone and i think there's those moments but i think fundamentally it's kind of this this notion of kind of distribution it's quite it's one that's always quite interesting and it's obviously you know the internet always allowed for that has does allow for that but it almost feels less so than when we started i guess when we started out there's a strong rhetoric that print was going to die and there's no need for print anymore.

19:41And we all know that that's not the case. But I guess the idea of newsletters and what we have online was going to completely replace it. You're right. Sort of 15 years ago, I think it was a lot easier to believe this idea that print would be going away forever, that we would all move to reading online. And like all things, the pendulum swings in the other direction eventually. And I think, you know, I have a front row seat to this right now, having a retail magazine store. And we see young people coming in all the time and they're coming in because they're looking for an excuse to get off the internet or they're looking for inspiration outside of the algorithm, right?

20:22Like all their friends are being fed the same ideas, the same fashion, the same art, the same music. And they're looking to find things that are different, like that sort of period of youth where you're trying to define your own identity, you know? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very much so. And I think that's great. It's kind of wonderful in that sense that it can exist in that way. I guess maybe what we're not used to is things coexisting. Yeah. It feels like it's just one or the other. And I don't know if that's just clickbait for newspaper articles or, yeah, I'm just not sure. I think that it's a shift.

20:58I don't think that sort of print and digital were ever meant to compete with each other, right? They have very different strengths and weaknesses. And where the internet is really fast, what we value in print is actually its slowness, like its disconnection from everything else. I think we still naturally value and trust print just subconsciously more than we trust the internet, which is also really interesting that that sort of has maybe only gotten worse over the last few years. Yeah, it's tricky. I think, I don't think that they were ever supposed to compete. I think you're right. I think that they were always meant to be in conversation with each other, print and digital.

21:37I guess, you know, in many ways, both of those mediums are still quite young. I mean, the printed book as we know it is relatively young, the internet even more so, and how we consume it and what it's meant to be. And I guess I feel like, I guess within the internet anyway, I guess everyone was quite quick to define its purpose and its UX principles and so forth. and it became... Because there was a lot of money to be made. Yes. Always. That's always the thing. I mean, capitalism kind of defines a lot. Yeah. Well, okay. So this sort of brings me to this idea that, I mean, you've always been working digitally, branding, printed matter, physical spaces, like sort of across many, many medium.

22:26How do you think about those things? Like in relation to each other or individually, do you try to sort of dive into whatever media a project requires or are you thinking about like the different touch points it'll need to be its most robust system yeah i think that's a great question i guess before our answer is my answer would be is that it's all the same like it's it's it's the same process if we take on that sort of prototyping analogy at the very beginning whether it's a book or if it's a website we we go through that same process but that said i think there are some projects that maybe that goes back to your earlier question there are some projects that just don't require that that the it is a simple it might just be a simpler brief um or there's something that's another factor that predetermines certain elements of it but i think yeah i guess i guess right now we see it as a we still see it as a similar process between one or the other but there are definitely moments where you know something exists it needs to exist at its loudest on a digital space or it needs to exist loudest in a physical experience and and i guess and i guess in those instances we're sort of pre-defining where do we kind of push that experimentation and and a lot of that understanding of what that is is largely to do with who who i guess who who's the target audience or what is that actual experience that's going to take place i think that's so interesting so one of my other interviews for the podcast someone else who will be speaking at design thinkers is peter smart from fantasy who does like so much thinking and working with sort of leaders in in digital spaces and his like one big piece of advice for designers in this like moment of sort of wild tech upheaval that's happening right now was like zoom out and really think about like where do you need to show up and why and I think that's sort of what you're saying right that no matter what the output the medium of the output is it should hopefully be in service to the project itself yeah exactly I think it's really well summarized I like the idea of thinking about where something needs to be loudest and where it can be quieter too right Like it's pretty rare that any of us are making a project anymore that only has one, one media that it comes out in at the end.

24:51Right. There's almost always two or three touch points. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And I guess that's something maybe working on exhibitions is kind of kind of taught us quite quickly in the sense that a marketing campaign or whether it's digital or in print needs to be loud, kind of cut through the noise or it can be super quiet. It just needs to be attention grabbing. But once you're in the physical space, everything tones down and it's more about, it could be more about the letter spacing or the split between the object, title and the artist and spacing and tension. It's more typographical.

25:32There's more subtleties that take place. I think that's always been of quite a strong interest of ours or why we enjoy exhibition designs quite a lot is that you have that sort of flexibility and you need to create a relationship between where it's super loud and trying to grab attentions on out of home campaigns and then a relationship to that, to just the typesetting of an object label. I think that's so interesting to think about. We'll talk about that more at some point. But I want to ask you about co-creation, too, because you mentioned it off the top. And I think from the outside, at least, it looks like co-creation has becoming sort of like a bigger and bigger part of Haydo's approach in the last few years.

26:13But like, what does that actually look like in practice for you? Yeah, I think that's super interesting that you feel that. I feel like we do less of it lately, or it's kind of evolved. And we're still, I guess, trying to work that out. as initially we were quite fortunate that we started our practice our like first projects were sort of working as artists um and we were working as like artists in residence for galleries at the south serpentine galleries and working in areas with youth groups as well as doing like family days and a lot of that was creating like a design process that would amplify the participants voices and over time we've kind of take those taken those learnings into things like branding and campaigns and so forth and it's not as direct a process necessarily so I guess a lot of that is kind of delved in in workshops and shared boards but I think now we're trying trialing creating more models that are specific to clients so but some of it's very basic that everyone started doing like shared figma boards or design files and so forth but i think i think a lot of it for us is kind of moving away from that rhetoric that the client is uneducated or evil or going to ruin your design your design process and thinking and kind of having a lot of respect for like a mutual respect for client and agency and finding the space where you're both you're both creating and areas where if it's possible to bring in audiences or wider sort of inputs.

27:52It's interesting that I sort of perceive it as more sort of seeing an increase in co-creation in the last couple of years and you less. But as you were speaking, I wonder if that's because that co-creation is into your client-based practice and not so much rooted in the community based practices as it once was. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I feel the community side, I think we felt a little bit disheartened, I guess. A lot of the projects were kind of backed by larger developers and fundamentally you just started to realize that really all the work that you were doing was just a tick on the box for the council or the developers to say they can go ahead.

28:31Or really extractive in some way, like trying to get something that was a little clouded and something else. Yeah, and it became less about a value exchange. So then I guess then we kind of made a decision, okay let's move away from that area let's go into things like i guess larger deliverables with with like clients like i guess brand and campaigns where we can shape visions and missions a bit more um to try and get a bit closer to the source and then equally i guess we have this ongoing i feel like maybe it's an ongoing responsibility or commitment or drive to kind of with hatter press to kind of do as many activations that we can that kind of connect local communities.

29:18And some of them are super simple. Like we have a zine swap where anyone can kind of come in and you bring a zine and you swap it with other people. But it's a very sort of social event and it just allows this sort of in-person dialogue. and I guess that's although it's not co-creation but I guess we feel like it's part of a community yeah I think it is so you mentioned I want to talk about the community piece a bit because you mentioned sort of doing more events based things yeah a little bit I guess we have more I guess we have launches and then we've had other publishers launching in our space that are like close close friends of ours and kind of just opening up.

30:04I think a part of maybe a couple years ago, I just started to realize that a lot of graduates were really disconnected from the professional industry. And I always remember studying, thinking like, this is such a great industry to be in, because you can speak to any professional and they're just so open, whether it's via email or you chat to them after a talk. So then I think we had this sort of drive to kind of try and bridge that gap a little bit further by opening up our space as a space that you can kind of come you know those free drinks and you just see what's happening and you can stay or you can you can go when you're ready sort of thing and kind of try to kind of bring that culture back into like a monthly routine a monthly routine in london and yeah i guess i guess that's kind of sort of will expand we want to build out an archive of zines from like a global contributions and have that play something that people can visit as well and book an appointment.

31:00I mean, zine culture is so fascinating and wonderful and inclusive and accessible. There's so much about it that I love so, so much. I think inclusivity is the thing that I think we really enjoy about it. It can be any topic and it can be super niche, but it's open to everyone. Well, and even the definition of a zine is sort of all over the place. We've had, we run an annual zine festival here at Issues for two weeks every summer. We're at zines sort of, we don't have shelf space for zines on the regular. We wish. So for two weeks, sort of zines take over the store. But we've had everything from zines made out of fabric to zines that are TV-shaped viewfinders to like where you click, you click the photos to, we've had so many things that are like, Like you wouldn't, when you imagine zine, that is not the output that you imagine.

31:56And there's so much magic. Yeah. I think magic is great too. I think because there is so much possibility, right? The spectrum is broad. There are no rules to zine making. You know, there's frameworks for sure, but there are no rules to it. And so that's been a really cool sort of experimental part to be part of. And then, yeah, you're right. To actually be able to meet those people because they don't often or they're meeting each other and really overwhelming sort of zine fair scenarios. Yeah, those fairs are intense. I'm happy being a participant, but I really struggle being like a viewer or a shopper because I find that it's just so much.

32:33Yeah, there's so much to see and take in. You can't actually absorb it all at once for sure. Okay, so then the physical space has really become like a bit of a community clubhouse, a community meeting place for you and your networks. Yeah, we'd like to, but it's hard to keep it consistent. That's one thing. we're not in a space where we can hire someone just to do that I think that would be nice to be able to be in a space where we could and then kind of grow into becoming a more regular part but right now I guess opening when we can and doing this sort of event and not having a pressure of having it regular I think that's been quite freeing and then focusing on these sort of new upcoming books that will kind of start to become its own series, a bit like the Scorsese books, where they can kind of be a regular publishing capsule and then start partnering with different co-publishers.