For the new visual approach, I revisited the question, “What defines a knife as a knife?” I think what I want to do is close to the following two examples:

1

How do we depict the wind?

Through blown up clothes, dancing flowers, spinning windmills. We can’t see the wind itself, but we understand it through other things.

2

How do we know what it is?

The best part of the original packaging, designed by Philippe Starck, is that an image of a lemon is placed next to the product to illustrate that it is a squeezer. He used the image of a lemon to explain a lemon squeezer.

The new packaging subtly retains this, a kind of designer’s consensus.

So

How do we know a knife is a knife? Through a sliced apple, orange, bread, or the bead of blood oozing from a thumb.

Among many kinds of image-object relationships, the one I am currently interested in can be described as, the image being a description of the object. The image is a powerful means of explaining the object. Something like a product manual or product packaging, they use images to illustrate objects.

So in this book, I describe the knife through slices of apples, oranges, and bread. I have carefully selected these images so that you can imagine how long, wide, sharp, and how new or old the knife is.

I tried to explain a knife through these images. The explanation itself is also a knifeless knife.