Summary

Imagine a Sustainable 2025 Nagoya

Few groups of people have a greater stake in the future of the planet than the students who study in colleges and universities around the world. These young people have the insight and maturity to understand the gravity of the problems that previous generations have contributed to and yet are largely optimistic about their own and the world’s future. The International New Designer’s Workshop 2007 DESIGN FOR SOCIAL INNOVATION provided participants of 21 universities and companies from Japan, China, Taiwan, Thailand and the U.S. with the chance to examine what a sustainable 2025 might look like for the city of Nagoya and to create innovative proposals for ways that the city could move towards a sustainable future.

Specific approaches to problem solving were neither dictated by the tutors nor by the program’s format. Instead students were encouraged to approach the task from many different angles. Workshop participants looked to the past with visits to the Edo-Tokyo Museum and the Museum Meiji-Mura and the village of Shirakawa-go, they reviewed the current status of sustainable products Eco Products Exhibition and were shown ways of problem solving at the International Conference on Design for Sustainability 2007. Through lectures and discussion student’s learned about sustainable design in China and the US and discovered techniques for imagining a future using the conceptual framework backcasting.

DESIGN FOR SOCIAL INNOVATION asked students to find creative solutions by evaluating what was essential from the present and past and by improving and innovating goods and services that would be needed in the year 2025. The workshop provided an open venue where students could be less concerned by practical limitations and contemporary realities and instead focus on synthesizing what they learned during the experience and discovery part of the workshop with their own ideas. The workshop culminated with each one of four student groups presenting their proposals for a sustainable 2025 Nagoya.

This treasure box of ideas included revolutionary approaches for connecting people to waste and waste removal, plans for an eco-hotel, a new way of evaluating products and services using a measuring system called an “e-cal”, and a concept for the revitalization of unused land. In each case the student groups came up with novel approaches not only solving current problems but also for presenting future opportunities. A sustainable 2025 Nagoya, as the four students groups conceived of it, is an exhilarating and progressive place to be.

During the presentations at Design Center NAGOYA on the 25 of December it was obvious that the professional designers who came to see the student’s final output were excited to interact with each group’s proposal, to challenge their feasibility and to add depth and specifics to the project’s scope.

A workshop of this nature is as much about the process of discovery and making connections as it is about final output. Student participants in the New Designer’s Workshop 2007 were challenged to move to multiple locations during the 10-day workshop and to assimilate a wide range of theories, activities, and experiences. It was not uncommon for students to question how a visit to a historical museum could have anything to do with the future or to wonder whether items presented at Eco-Products would be environmentally friendly enough to have a place in a sustainable 2025. In some respects the workshop activities mirrored the challenges that professionals face when confronted by environmental and social problems. How can we learn from the past without getting stuck in outmoded thinking? How can designers who use different media and sometimes speak different languages work to solve the same problem? With so much to do, how do we choose a focus? If we look to the future, how can our ideas be generous not only to ourselves but also to other people who inhabit this earth?

One thing that seems evident after seeing the student’s proposals is that as many questions as there were, and as many times as students may have expressed conflicting opinions, the importance of the task at hand allowed the participants to overcome their differences. By the final days of the workshop, country of origin, age, work experience, language spoken, and prestige of the home institutions mattered less than the completion of each group’s vision of a sustainable 2025. And even though giving the city of Nagoya a sustainable treasure box was the stated goal of DESIGN FOR SOCIAL INNOVATION, workshop participants came away enriched and with their own treasure box of new concepts, ideas, and connections to take home and share with their classmates, co-workers, companies, and schools. DESIGN FOR SOCIAL INNOVATION proves that by combining connectedness and hard work with imagination, innovation and vision this generation of young people is poised to become vital participants in the creation a sustainable future both the year 2025 and for each year until then.

Text by Aaris Sherin
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