Welcome to Tokyo

We’re live in Tokyo!

Not with an office, but with an Outpost.
A beautiful little space in Aoyama, Tokyo, where we will begin a design conversation between the Emirati visual identity and the Japanese visual identity.
What will it look like? We’re not entirely sure, but that’s fine - the best adventures are the ones with the biggest question marks.

What’s an Outpost?
At the moment, it’s an experiment - an ambitious idea to have international spaces where our team can fully immerse themselves in specific design cultures in order to feed our design souls and channel the goodness back into our work in Abu Dhabi.

Our first Design Outpost is right in the heart of Tokyo. It’s a space to put us physically in the center of a significant design culture and conversation. A place to be completely surrounded by a design culture that has lessons for us to learn and inspiration to mainline. It’s proximity to ideas, examples, research, case studies, experiences, training, connections, collaborators, people and all the other layers of good stuff that come with being in a city like this.

Why start Outposts?
Because we need to go deeper. In our usual process of seeking discomfort - doing things that are hard because they force growth - we need to expose ourselves to a level of immersion that goes way beyond google and general research. Design isn’t a superficial exercise and the depth required to make it excellent is something we will get from being on the ground in Japan.

An open space.
A kind of design embassy in Tokyo, where UAE friends, partners, collaborators and associates can use as a base when they’re in the city, and help feed the same design conversation.
Seriously, if you’re moving through Tokyo hit us up. The door is open.

What’s inside?
A place to work, with all the things you need to work, like power, coffee and wifi.
A Fount store, where we can display some of the Emirati-inspired design objects alongside Japanese objects and designs.
An exhibition space, to gather people around good design and ideas.
A wall, where we will continue building our hypothesis about the connection to, and lessons from, Japanese visual identity.

At the time of hitting post on this we’ve been on the ground here for a week, long enough to understand that being in Tokyo is going to be the best lesson in design and identity that we could ever hope for.
Keep an eye on our instagram to see our adventures, and if you’re ever in Tokyo swing by.