Chocolate. It's a surprising theme for the first show at a brand new design centre. But then, 21_21 Design Sight is a surprising design centre. Issey Miyake, Naoto Fukasawa, Taku Satoh, Tadao Ando -- that all the leading players are active and world-class designers is surprising for a start. But perhaps what is most surprising is that, in a country that has a worldwide reputation for design, 21_21 Design Sight is Japan's first-ever centre dedicated purely to design.

I became involved when Taku Satoh asked me to help with the communications strategy, at the end of 2005. Nothing much had been decided yet -- perhaps intentionally, to let chance have its fun. An early version of the blue logo was pinned to the wall. There was chocolate, too. A huge photograph of an erotic, chocolate-covered mouth stood in the corner. In a glass bookcase were a bowl of cocoa beans and bars of expensive-looking Belgian chocolate. The months went by, the chocolate increased, and the room filled up with objects and images as 21_21 began to take shape.

I was charged with creating a web presence for 21_21. Easy enough to make a website, but with 18 months until the opening day, there was nothing to put in it. We decided to get the three directors to meet at some chosen location once a month to talk about design, and use that as content. Miyake and Satoh spent two hours in a convenience store. Miyake quietly bought a box of ice creams, and handed them out to everyone when we were done. We took Fukasawa and Miyake up Tokyo Tower. After the official talk session, we found a print-club machine, and all piled in for a group photo -- with a virtual Tokyo Tower as the background. Work, and play.

In August, preparations for the Chocolate show began in earnest. Fukasawa invited a huge group of designers, including myself, to gather for a day of workshops. The discussion turned to the cocoa trade, which led eventually to James Mollison's spectacular portraits of cocoa farmers in war-torn Cote d'Ivoire. The photographs are beautiful, and chilling -- highlighting precisely the bitter irony of a multi-billion dollar industry producing a luxury product "everybody loves," from the sweat of farmers who have never tasted it and will never be able to afford to buy it. And highlighting, also, the dilemma of another multi-billion dollar industry: design. From the earliest times humans have desired to make the tools of their societies both functional and beautiful. Today that is the job of the designer. Yet so often the more the designer works to make things beautiful, the more luxurious and removed from society they become.

21_21 Design Sight is a luxurious place with a luxurious mandate. Perhaps, though, by taking such an unusual theme for its first group show, it has approached that luxury head-on. It could easily have chosen to be a museum, grandly cataloging the extraordinary successes of the Japanese design industry from a safe distance. But instead it has positioned itself as an open box for designers and design. The final collection of original works in the Chocolate exhibition -- some tiny and hesitating, others big and brassy -- make for a playful but strangely awkward show, and seem to exemplify 21_21 Design Sight itself. "Just what are we designers doing?" they seem to ask. "And what are we supposed to do?"