Research Center for DEsigning
Social Innovation in Global Network
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Research Center for DEsigning
Social Innovation in Global Network
2024.0405
Event report
On January 27, 2024, DLab Dialog Day 2024 – a two-part event consisting of a symposium to share its activities with a wide audience and a co-creation workshop, DLab Drama & Dialog – was held. DLab has been working in many ways to realize the future we want. The event was held at the Hisao & Hiroko Taki Plaza on the Ookayama campus of Tokyo Tech* and was attended by about 100 people from within and outside of the university. (Speakers’ and participants’ affiliations and job titles are those as of the date of the event.)
* The symposium session was also streamed online.
1. “Introduction & Activities” – Presentation of the efforts of DLab in AY2023
2. “Seeds for our future world” – Students’ visions of our future society the course of “Introduction to the design of future society” with the participants from “DLab Partners”
3. “Future research sprouts” – Research presentations and panel talks by recipients of the DLab Challenge and DLab Challenge Advanced research grants
4. Closing
1. Orientation
2. Keynote speech “Reflections on DLab’s future scenarios”
3. Group work – Creative dialogue in small groups to dramatize and personalize a world where future scenarios become reality
4. Closing
The morning symposium began with opening remarks by Provost Isao Satoh, DLab Director.
“If I were to explain what DLab is in a few words, it is ‘a mechanism to create the society you want.’ Through today’s event, I hope you will get a sense of how DLab can help you create the future we want.”
The Presentation following the opening remarks introduced DLab’s goal of “thinking about and designing together with society in discussing the future we want”. The goal and past achievements such as the Tokyo Tech Future Chronology, building a new future concept ‘Transchallenge World‘, are few efforts amongst many in realizing the vision of our future society.
The second session Seeds for Our Future Society introduced the contents and deliverables of the Introduction to the design of future society class, a part of the university initiative in Reaching out to Society and the Next Generation and Raising Awareness, as well as the thoughts of the students who participated in the class.
In this class, students are asked to aspire about a desirable future society in a group and present their ideas in the form of a future newspaper. At the beginning of the session, Hiroichi Yanase (Professor, Institute for Liberal Arts), a member of DLab who is leading the class, introduced the main points and the general framework of the class: “Through learning and presenting about the SDGs and listening to the future of businesses and its strategies presented by DLab Partners’ companies, students were able to develop foresight-looking skills and their ability to communicate, think about what our future society will look like, and present their ideas in a newspaper format.”
In addition, Renge Jibu (Associate Professor, Institute for Liberal Arts), who also taught the class as a DLab member, explained how the ‘future newspaper’ was actually created. Three of the students then gave presentations on the newspaper articles and advertisements they had created. The presentations included articles such as “Humanoid AI robots overtake the world’s population, leaving humans short on exercise” and “An era arriving where humanoid AI robots could take over the world by taking control of networks managed by national governments as critical information infrastructure,” as well as the content of an advertisement for a courier service that sends packages by using 3D printers to output the actual product at the delivery destination. The content of the future newspaper was created through the utilization of generative AI.
During the free talk after the presentations, members from the DLab Partners who have participated in the class were asked for their impressions. One commented that they were stimulated by the ideas from the students, which were quite different from their own, and another applauded that the course was excellent, and wanted to utilize the class contents as a reference for their own business in re-imaging their corporate future. DLab members in the audience also raised numerous comments and questions about the newspaper.
Around the hall where the symposium was held, eight newspapers created by group of students were displayed, and participants seemed to have enjoyed looking at the inventive headlines and articles that prompted them into creative thinking.
Since the 2020 academic year, DLab has been supporting research leading to the realization of the “ideal” future society based on the general will and the common good in the form of an interdisciplinary research grant, the DLab Challenge. Given the success of DLab Challenge grant, the DLab Challenge Advanced was launched in the 2023 academic year, which supports promising research projects that target to realize the future vision at a larger-scale; such as establishing a future research center or acquiring external fundings.
During the session “Future research sprouts,” DLab Deputy Director Naoto Ohtake (Director of the Institute of Innovative Research) gave an overview of this research funding scheme, followed by presentations by the principal investigators of two of the studies supported in the 2023 academic year.
[Research by recipients of DLab Challenge Advanced]
●Research Topic: Youth Sanctuary: Cooperative metaverse platform to support self-enhance of youth
Principal Investigator: Hiroyuki Umemuro, Professor, Department of Industrial Engineering and Economics, School of Engineering
The team aims to build a platform for nurturing and watching over youth in a metaverse that guarantees anonymity and is not constrained by location. Through the involvement of schools, families, and government agencies and together in dynamic collaboration, our team is aiming to create a safe zone that serves as a refuge for all youth, including junior high, high school students, and university students. Through collaboration among researchers in diverse fields such as technology, psychology, education, and public health, the primary goal is to empirically elucidate the kind of technology to be created and how it should be used to achieve the well-being of people and society, and to verify the effectiveness of the overall design and various services, and to create a mechanism for stakeholder linkage.
[Research by recipients of DLab Challenge]
●Research Topic: Biological, chemical, materials-science, and computational perspective analyses of mechanisms by which reef-building corals and zooxanthellae contribute to the global environment
Principal Investigator: Akira Kato, Associate Professor, Department of Life Science and Technology, School of Life Science and Technology
This study explains from multiple perspectives the mechanisms of reef-building corals, which have a close symbiotic relationship with photosynthetic zooxanthellae and support a rich ecosystem that serves as a cradle of the sea. Specifically, researchers with diverse backgrounds gather around the themes of “life” and “environment” to conduct research using various analytical methods in which they specialize, such as electrophysiology, comparative genome analysis, and photochemical reaction modeling, to undertake research on calcium carbonate skeletal formation, carbon dioxide fixation, and symbiosis and material exchange in coral reefs, and to create a new perspective on the conservation of coral reefs and prevention of their bleaching.
The presentations were followed by a question-and-answer session with the participants. At the end of the session, a panel talk was held by Takao Kuramochi (Deputy Director-General, Center for Research and Development Strategy, Japan Science and Technology Agency) and Junko Mokuno (Vice president of Trail INC.), who reviewed the selected research as DLab members, moderated by Ohtake.
In his talk, Kuramochi said, “This kind of research approach, in which researchers from different fields work together to solve real world problems and get to the essence of the problems, has not been seen in the research world until now. I think it is great that the DLab is facilitating and supporting this kind of approach.” Mokuno continued, “In order to conduct research to create the future we want, it is necessary for researchers in various fields to cooperate with each other, and it is highly likely that the nature of research activities will change in the future. I would like those who are engaged in research at Tokyo Tech, including students, to be aware of this fact and take action.” The session closed with a wrap-up by Ohtake: “The key to the future is how people with expertise can collaborate with each other.”
Umemuro and Kato introducing their own research projects
At the end of the symposium, DLab Director Satoh again took the podium to deliver the closing remarks. “It is impossible to create the society we want with only one area of specialized knowledge, and it is important for people in various fields to cooperate and weave the knowledge together,” said Satoh, reiterating the importance of collaboration. “I believe DLab’s role is to set the stage” He concluded the morning symposium by stating that DLab’s activities will remain a central part of the university’s efforts even after Tokyo Tech becomes Institute of Science Tokyo, and that the university hopes to make a greater contribution to society through DLab.
The afternoon co-creation workshop, DLab Drama & Dialog, was conducted exclusively face-to-face with approximately 60 participants from within and outside the university.
First, DLab members and overall workshop facilitators Takashi Takao (Professor, Institute for Liberal Arts), Asa Ito (Director, Future of Humanity Research Center, Institute of Innovative Research; Professor, Institute for Liberal Arts), and Yuta Suzuki (Associate Professor, Institute for Liberal Arts) gave an orientation and overview of the workshop.
In the keynote speeches that followed, facilitated by Ito and Suzuki, Ohtake and Kaori Nemoto of Hakuhodo Inc., a specially appointed associate professor at the DLab, talked about the process of creating future scenarios, their thoughts on the scenarios, and future prospects.
Nemoto, who played a central role in the development of the future scenarios, explained the methodology used in their formulation. She explained that the scenarios were created by taking into account technological advances and social changes, drawing various visions of the future from multiple perspectives, including a “predictable future” and “future that we want,” and then creating scenarios from the various “grains of the future” obtained from these scenarios and putting them together.
Ohtake also spoke about the background of DLab’s establishment as the basis for the formulation of future scenarios, and mentioned the fact that prior to its establishment, researchers from all departments within the university, including those in the fields of science, technology, and the humanities, engaged in activities to think about future research beyond their fields. He stated that the DLab Future Scenario is unique in that it takes the scientific findings of Tokyo Tech as its starting point while considering the vision of a future that we want.
Half way during the symposium Suzuki commented on the positioning of the future scenarios: “The two studies selected for the 2023 Dlab Challenge are ambitious efforts to discover challenges in the course of research and to create novel yet simple approaches that overcome conventional approaches. The future scenario is the starting point for such flexible research activities, and DLab has become the core of defending research freedom.”
The remark led to a discussion of backcasting, which DLab uses in envisioning the future. Backcasting is a method in which a desired vision of the future is the starting point, and the technology needed to achieve it and what needs to be done now are considered. One of the advantages of this approach is that “when we think about the future from the present, we tend to be constrained by the conditions of the present, but when we think about the future from the perspective of what we want, it is easier to think about what we can do to create it, without being shackled by the present situation.”
Ito also pointed out that DLab’s strength is that it not only envisions our future society, but also has the means to create it through research, and that Tokyo Tech has low barriers between organizations, making it easier to conduct cross-disciplinary research.
Future scenarios are the result of a long process of convergence of more than 110 grains of the future, or future elements, obtained through workshops with diverse participants from within and outside the university and through future projections by companies and public institutions.
Toward the end of the talk, it was mentioned that people’s thoughts and ideas were put into these scenarios, and at the same time, the importance of updating scenarios in accordance with technological advancements and social changes, and that the group work that followed was one of the ways to achieve this.
After the keynote speech, participants began to work in groups on drama writing and dialogue, the core of the co-creation workshop. First, as an introduction, 14 groups of four or five participants went through the 24 future scenarios posted on the walls.
Participants then worked on dramatizing future scenarios through a mental and physical warm-up for brainstorming and in preparing their bodies for physical expression. The participants were assigned which future scenario they would work on by lottery, and created a one- to two-minute skit that depicted a scene in which that scenario became a reality.
For example, the group that dramatized the future scenario No. 06, “Exercise your right to disconnect and reap the benefits,” depicted a horror story of a situation in which one’s actions are being broadcast to those around one via a network, and then portrayed the beauty of a “disconnected environment.” Other skits presented featured scenarios with inventive stories, such as a character who looked like a robot was actually a human being, and a skit that drew repeated audience into laughter with its comedic depiction of an interaction with an AI.
After all the performances were over, participants wrote their impressions of each group’s productions on sticky notes and pasted them on the Future Scenario poster, and each group reflected on the impressions. Afterwards, the two groups formed teams and discussed their impressions of each other’s production; what impressed them, and what they had learned through the workshop.
While carefully reading the future scenarios, the participants created their own dramas of the situations in which these scenarios have become a reality, and visualized them more concretely by acting them out and watching other group’ skits. The co-creation workshop DLab Drama & Dialog, DLab’s first such attempt ended with a great deal of excitement.
By using graphic recording, participants engaged in dialog while referring to the visualized group work.(Graphic recorder: Junko Shimizu)
With all the main sessions of DLab Dialog Day 2024 thus concluded, Tokyo Tech executive vice president for education Jun-ichi Imura delivered the closing remarks.
After giving his impressions of the day’s activities, Imura concluded his remarks by telling the participants, “The ‘society of the future’ that we have in mind today is one that you will be able to create on your own in the future. Therefore, I hope that you will continue to think and talk about ‘what kind of future we want to create’.” He ended his remarks with words of thanks to the speakers and the audience.
The DLab Dialog Day 2024 program was designed to focus more strongly on DLab’s activities, including the future scenarios that form the core of the DLab’s vision of our future society, and to engage a diverse range of participants from within and outside the university, including faculty, and students of different positions and ages in dialogue. This made the characteristics of DLab, such as “future-driven free thinking” and “activities that transcend borders such as differences in positions and research fields,” emerge more clearly.
With the upcoming integration with Tokyo Medical and Dental University in the fall of 2024 as a major milestone, DLab will continue to deepen its collaboration with society and promote further activities to update and realize future scenarios
