A quick post-Labor Day recap……..

The last three weeks of August went by very quickly.  Anime scripwriter Dai Sato was in town along with Ryan Morris, his interpreter, for a couple of weeks to teach Anime Production/Scriptwriting to 25 high school students. Here are some summary videos of the classes he taught during those two weeks. Learn about 起承転結 (Ki-Sho-Ten-Ketsu) and 鳥獣戯画 (Cho-Ju-Gi-ga), Japan’s oldest manga. It is fascinating!

Also here is a link to Dai Sato speaking about how to create anime characters.

On the last day of the two weeks, the students divided into 5 groups presented their work at the auditorium. Here is a link to the 15 second previews that each group created. The preview was presented along with their story proposals. Dai told me later that he was intrigued that how all the groups had the notion of  fate/destiny embedded in their theme. He also thought that all story proposals dealt with the issues of coping with diversity and different values. He felt that groups made up of Japanese high school students would have come up with totally different theme and story ideas. Dai also had a chance to meet up with his old acquaintance, Justin Leach, also an IN member, who currently works at the Blue Sky Studios as a Senior Pipeline Engineer.  We paid a visit to Blue Sky in Connecticut and Dai was invited to speak about his work and the creative process to the storyboard department staff. Then we all took a tour of the studio.  Dai kept on saying how amazingly better the work environment is for creators like him in the U.S.  It was indeed a beautiful office space with huge windows overlooking a forest outside. There were ping pong tables and pinball machines, too.

Justin Leach and Dai Sato

During the last week of August, the Kyomachiya preservation group was in town after attending a symposium in Boston on historic preservation. The occasion was to celebrate the 50th anniversary of sister city between Boston and Kyoto. It was great to see Fusae Kojima again, a machiya owner and the President and Executive Director of Kyomachiya Revitalization Study Group. She was one of the panelists at the symposium we organized in collaboration with Kyoto Center for Community Collaboration (Machisen) last November at Japan Society. The symposium summary is featured in a new book titled Machiya Revival in Kyoto edited by Machisen. It just came out in July.  As part of the Innovators Network activities, we continue to support the Kyomachiya preservation group’s effort to gain further recognition abroad.

Last but not least, we have some newly edited videos of the Social Design Forum we organized with JIDPO (Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization) back in February.  I highly recommend that you watch Valerie Casey’s video on Design Thinking especially if you are a design student.

Masaaki Ikeda’s video, which touches on the history of  social design in Japan, is also quite interesting if you heard about Michael Linton, who had designed the LETS (Local Exchange Trading System).

(Fumiko)

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Social Design – Design + Community + Social Impact

Max, Valerie, & Casey

Design + Community + Social Impact The Latest from GOOD Magazine and IDEO

1:55 pm – The conference hall at Midtown is filling up. Most of the audience looks to be under 30 – designers, students, people interested in sustainability. What is social design? That’s the title of the first session and we’ll be hearing from Max Schorr of GOOD Magazine.

2:10 The conference gets off to a start with welcoming remarks from JIDPO (Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization) Project Department Director Shinji Yajima, Japan Society President Richard Wood, and Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership executive director Sadaaki Numata. Everyone stresses the importance of people-to-people exchange for fostering innovation. CGP is one of Japan Society’s partners and supporters of the U.S.-Japan Innovators Network.

2:20 GOOD Magazine Co-Founder Max Schorr. ALTRUISM. The idea is to do good because you want to. GOOD wants to be in the middle space of pragmatic and idealistic. GOOD is not a binary proposition.

Max Schorr

2:25 Core values of GOOD – Transparency, creativity, authenticity, utility and … Love. Work + Love = Great Things. Max came to Tokyo about two years ago and met Rosanne Haggerty. Business used to be about loss and profit. Now harm and social value have become important points on the value axis. Products and opportunities that get consumers what they want but also provide social value: The new Walmart?

2:35 GOOD: Working with businesses to improve the world. There are models were consumers and businesses can exist in the same space to create social value. “Right now we’re in this interesting space of triple bottom line – money, social value and environmental impact”. How do you scale authenticity -? How do you reach the masses? Max thinks Obama’s a move in the right direction. You have to make good in people’s self interest. One way is to get global by being locally contextualized.

2:40 And Max adds: “It’s crucial always to have a sense of humor.” “I don’t want to be part of your revolution if I can’t dance.”

2:42 GOOD Co-Founder and Creative Director Casey Caplowe. YOU+ US = GOOD

Casey Caplowe

2:45 GOOD is a magazine, website – a lot of different things. For people who give a damn. Design isn’t just making things look cool but is about problem solving. Info graphics convey complex ideas. GOOD is a combination art project, problem-solving social networker, media machine. They’ve created a real community that’s collaborative and interactive.

3:10 Masaaki Ikeda, Creative Director, Tokyo Changemakers and Eco Plaza. The Evolution of Social Design in Japan. What is the future of social design in Japan? Japan lacks leadership – what does that bode for the future? Mr. Ikeda’s a bit older than Max and Casey. He talks about key people who influenced his journey. New Association Movement NAM – Sakamoto Ryuichi helped found this movement when he lived in New York. The start of social design in Japan? In 1997 the Kyoto Protocol and penetration of in the Internet had a big impact.

3:15 People where dancing in the streets in 1997. Kyoto Protocol – BIG BANG for the eco movement in Japan. NPOs started to spread in Japan after the Kobe earthquake. 1999 was a watershed year – THE YEAR OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP. “It was the first year we began to have a community currency.” NHK the broadcaster started to cover the idea of community currency. Michael Linton – LETS – Local Exchange Trading System. Ikeda’s magazine: KOKOKU. ADBUSTERS magazine. A Vancouver based anti consumerist magazine. An angry manifesto. “Fuck Committees”. FIRST THINGS FIRST.

3:25 “We should not waste our talent on frivolous products.” Ikeda was influenced by all this. Then he founded KOKOKU. Even money can be designed. “I wanted to make this the central concept of my magazine.” Read Michael Linton’s OPEN MONEY MANIFESTO. Make a community currency. “Money is just information…”. KOKOKU was in English and Japanese. There are seven issues and they were beautifully designed. “This magazine was a platform for social design activities.” DESIGN HAS THE POWER TO LEAD PEOPLE TO A BETTER FUTURE.

3:30 EARTH DAY. Bearded hippie throw-backs disbanded and brought in new blood. A NEW EARTH DAY 2001 with broader appeal. Rebirth Earth Day. Make every day Earth Day. Ikeda established Earth Day Money. 2002 – Candle Night. “We wanted to have an environmental movement that was global. Turn off the lights and light a candle and spend the night maybe praying”. Then came the “Sprinkling Water” campaign. Water on the pavement to cool down the earth.

3:40 Visit Eco Plaza. More trees bench? More trees design. It’s a system for reforestation. Japan has a lot of unattended forests. Ikeda: The forests need to be responsibly managed so they are sustainable. Cull trees, make useful products. And also tokyochangemakers. Venture capital, entrepreneurs.

Maasaki Ikeda

3:55 Valerie Casey, Leader, Digital Design Experience, IDEO & Founder, The Designers Accord. IDEO – A quick look at five projects.

1. American Red Cross – Why I Give (Blood). Who gets the blood? That was the focus of the ads. “Unappetizing”. IDEO redesigned the ads. People had an emotional connection but a better campaign is to give voice to the blood donors.

Valerie Casey

2. Healthcare. How doctors perform, how nurses work. IDEO redesigned the EMERGENCY ROOM experience. IDEO looked at NASCAR – triaging cars, triaging people. Clusters of activities… little kits, how to better treat patients.

3. Nokia. ENGAGE gaming platform. Make a better game.

4. Bank of America. In bill paying, people would round up when paying their bills to the next dollar. IDEO opened savings accounts for people who did this to help people save. $10 billion have been saved since 2005, $1 billion from the rounding.

5. 1/3 work at IDEO is social impact. Kick-start pump in Kenya. A light weight water pump you can take on your bicycle. Pump goes 18 meters into the ground and brings water up from the water table. Helps farms sustain and make a living. Many users are women. Design intervention. Recovered materials used – Aesthetic design? “Probably the ugliest thing IDEO has ever made”. But utilitarian.

4:05 Foundation of IDEO. Design Thinking. Think about the PEOPLE, the BUSINESS and the TECHNOLOGY. Design can solve any problem. The magic is to start with the PEOPLE FIRST. Subtle human behaviors are the key. IDEO uses its network. That’s how to make great impact. Open source philosophy – successes and failures. Always balance money with what your heart wants to do. “We are designers who are accidently good business people”.

4:10 Valerie: We’re in the business of designing CONSEQUENCES. The ipod has become the shorthand for success. The tyranny of the ipod. One client: “I want the ipod of diapers”. Zone of control and zone of influence. You need to tap into the zone of influence if we’re going to have social impact. Not just the beginning of the cycle.

4:15 “Green” – “Sustainability” Where do you start? Boring? Too hard? Giant jellyfish off the coast of Japan. She shows a faked Photoshopped image of a huge jellyfish. But there are real grotesque stories. A dead albatross with plastic in its stomach. Plastic sitting in the bottom of the ocean. ALL THE PLASTIC WE’VE EVER MADE IS STILL WITH US. Our earth is a closed system.

4:20 Designers Accord: Sustainability = Environmental impact + social impact. Army ants marching to their death… but we aren’t ants. Designers can make a difference. Designers Accord focuses on personal and communal accountability. 1) People and Places. Design schools educate and go green. 2) Everyone in DA has a conversation about sustainability with every customer and client that walks in their door. 3) Everyone in DA agrees to share their resources, best practices, foibles, etc with everyone else … a virtuous loop. July 2007… 450 People, 3 Countries, 4 Disciplines….now 150,000 people, 100 countries, all disciplines.

4:25 DA = Co-Create. How about a solar powered coffee maker? Solar panels in the shape of traditional tiles. Publish your carbon footprint so you can see what it looks like. Ask people in a public space to hand crank a wheel to generate light to understand the energy needed to generate electricity. People wrap a design school in recycled paper with the word WRONG. Stop thinking of design as the design of THINGS ONLY. The Aquaduct Team. A bicycle for transporting water.

Paul Hawken: “A lot of people – including me – wish the problem would go away but once you see it, it’s impossible to unsee.”

Q&A

How do you get people involved?

Casey: Spends his days thinking about this.
Max: This trip has re-energized us and meeting with greenz was very inspirational. Talked with Yugo Nakamura, the web designer and that was inspiring.
Valerie: Awareness does not always equate to action. That’s why the UN is failing; that’s why the Kyoto Protocol is failing. We need new models, different models than we have now.
Casey: I’ve learned that design, business, you have to view as means, not as ends. It’s the consequence, that matters. Self interest and the greater good – there’s a place where they overlap. Invent in THAT SPACE.

A question for Max: What is the definition of “designer”? And how does GOOD get income?

Max: I’m basic in my ability to create beautiful communications. But I do think of myself as a problem solver. GOOD revenue is advertising based.

A question for Casey: How do you maintain the quality of what you do?

Casey: It’s tapping into people who are doing the best work. GOOD layout and design is done by a small studio in NYC. Collaboration is key. Cherry pick the people who would be most fun to work with. We have a good project people want to be a part of. As GOOD grows, the community starts to create the content.

A question first to Valerie: In Japan I’m sure you met a of people, but give us something that impressed you about good design in Japan.

Valerie: People live so densely here with such civility. The architect Tsukamoto designs for small spaces. If design can make you want to live in a tiny 400 square foot space then it’s succeeding.

Casey: There’s a nice balance in Japan. Japan can be balanced and extreme at the same time.

Valerie: That’s a good point. In the US in many places it feel like the lowest common denominator. People in the US tend to speak down and not elevate the conversation.

Casey: We came here to talk about sustainable design. We always felt it had global importance. GOOD is largely focused in the US. So it’s amazing to hear similar ideas talked about here. What we thought was a global issue is definitively global.

(Daniel Rosenblum)

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Yugo Nakamura – A Wizard, a True Star

Yugo Nakamura – A Wizard, a True Star

It’s the first day of our exploration of design and sustainability in Tokyo with Max Schorr and Casey Caplowe of GOOD Magazine and Valerie Casey of IDEO.

Wending our way through Shibuya, we arrive at tha ltd, the studio of maverick web designer Yugo Nakamura. You enter through the ground floor of a non-descript apartment building to an open foyer that doubles as a meeting space.

Nakamura, dressed casually in jeans and blue sweater, is a tall man with a shock of black hair peppered with gray. Using a laptop and projector he shares some of his latest work involving interactive Internet animation, including a series of ads for Uniqlo.

Another of Nakamura’s projects is an image bookmarking website, designed as a frame. “I love making images and looking at images I love,” Nakamura says. .

“It’s interesting because it’s the first generation of digital interactive art design on the web,” says Schorr.

Asked about his approach to work, Nakamura says, “I’m interested in methodology. “We work like craftsmen. Our clients have their ideas. We want to make our products as original and fun as possible.”

Asked about collaborating with his American visitors somewhere down the road, Nakamura’s enthusiastic.

He notes that getting people to do good often starts on a small scale, from mundane social networking like dating and friend finding.

“Maybe we can come up with a mechanism for mobilizing a small part of people who that will enable the collections of goodness among people through communication,” he says.

(Daniel Rosenblum)

Yugo Nakamura at his office

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Design & Sustainability

Newark Airport, morning, Feb.3, 2009

I’m waiting for my flight to Tokyo, thinking about the three days of intensive meetings Japan Society‘s Innovators Network will be hosting on the theme of sustainability and cutting edge design.

GOOD Magazine Co-Founders Casey Caplowe and Max Schorr, and Valerie Casey, Leader, Digital Design Experience of IDEO arrive in Tokyo on Thursday.

Among those they’ll meet with are Yugo Nakamura, a web designer, who is considered one of the most interesting talents in today’s digital design field; Satoshi Yasui, Head of Design Planning at Muji; and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, architect and founder of Atelier Bow-Wow, a leader of a new generation of Tokyo architects that promote a site- and use-specific approaches to design.

On February 8, Max, Casey and Valery will have a chance to share their thoughts on design and sustainability with a wider group at a public symposium, cohosted by JIDPO (Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization), called “Design + Community + Social Impact“.

I’ll be blogging live about the symposium, which starts at 2 p.m. Tokyo time.

The symposium also includes a dialogue between the Americans and Katsufumi Nagai, art director at Hakuhodo Design, Soichi Ueda, producer at Spaceport, on “The Designer’s Mission Today.’

Should be a lot of fun!

(Daniel Rosenblum)

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GOOD: I want my money in this envelope.

In Japan, we have a tendency to wrap everything. We are very much into packaging. Beautiful packaging. When people get married or die, we have the custom of wrapping money in an envelope and wrap the envelope with strands of cords which are made of rice paper. We call these paper cords mizuhiki. The mizuhiki could be quite elaborate. The colors of the cords are usually different depending on the occasion. For wedddings and auspicious occasions, the cords are red, white and gold. For funerals, the cords are black and white. A visitor from Japan gave us the following mizuhiki envelope today. It is created by Yasuhiro Asano, a designer based in Tokyo. He uses traditional paper, washi and mizuihiki. It is called Alphabet mizuhiki. (Look for product number 46.) I like it very much. It is quite different from the ones that I saw growing up. Definitely a merge of Japanese tradition and the West. My coworker Betty is leaving for Japan tomorrow for the design and sustainability exchange that we are organizing. From the U.S., Max Schorr and Casey Caplowe from GOOD magazine and Valerie Casey from IDEO, the founder of the Designers Accord, are joining.  They are all speaking at the Social Design symposium to be held in Tokyo on February 8. Betty will be showing the GOOD mizushiki envelope to Max and Casey. I bet they would like it. (Fumiko)

Good mizuhiki envelope

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ifest報告-バルセロナ発のイノベーターズの集まり Part 2

ifest報告の続きです。一日目の午後の部ではシリコンバレーに本拠地を置くデザイン・コンサルティング会社IDEOのメンバーがワークショップを開きました。IDEOの人は、通常は何日間もかかけて行うワークショップをほんの２時間で行うのでかなりの短縮版と繰り返していましたが、storytelling-brainstorming-prototyping-最後にtop ideasを発表という流れにのって、来年のifestをどうするか？をテーマにアイディアを出し合いました。

チームの人は皆スペイン人でしが、私のために英語で話してくれました。最初はチームの中で「今までに会議やワークショップに出席して一番印象に残っていること」をまず発表しあい（storytelling）、そのあとでテーマに即したアイディアをいろいろと出し合う。（brainstorming）そのアイディアをもとに具体的なプロトタイプ（試作品）を考案。（prototyping）。最後に皆の前で発表。

私たちのグループが取り上げたのは「言語を使わないコミュニケーションの方法はあるのか」というトピック。

出てきたアイディアをペタペタと貼っていく。。。。

今年で１０回目を迎えたifestも、参加者の大半がスペイン人にもかかわらず、今年からは会合の基本言語を英語に変更。英語が苦手な人は同通に頼るしかありません。時々スピーカーがスペイン語で発表したときだけは、私も同通用のヘッドセットを取りに走りました。ifestが今回は基本言語を英語にしたのは、今後はスペイン語圏だけではなくグローバルなコミュニティにアピールするためなのでしょう。

ワークショップの話に戻りますが、結局私達のチームがいきついたのは、動物のお面を皆でかぶるというもの。言語抜きで子供や動物は意思の疎通の行うという考えからヒントを得て、動物のお面をみんなでつくってみました。。。。。（今思い出すと、とても幼稚なアイディアとも思えるのですが、そのときは真剣でした。。。。。）今回のようなワークショップの場合は、最後に行き着くアイディアよりも、全然知らない人たちとグループを組んで、目標に向かって走るという行為に意義があるのでしょう。

皆、真面目に取りくんでいます。。。。。

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