The Future Living Lab activities conceptualize the future by drawing on real-world, local-community living.
Today’s Japan faces various challenges, including a declining birthrate and aging population resulting in a shrinking population, aging social infrastructure, and child poverty, which are clearly impacting people’s lives in regional communities.
We are currently witnessing a drive to try and solve these problems using the latest technologies, such as big data, artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous driving. But these solutions cannot function without the cooperation of people living in the actual, specific communities.
That’s why we started our Future Living Lab activities to join forces with local communities to create a better future together. We aim to create visions for future local community society by cooperating not only with individual citizens, but also with NGOs, non-profit organizations, small and medium-sized enterprises, and central and municipal governments.
We proposed a framework for forging new links between local residents, farms, and restaurants called the Bring and Eat. My Vegetables campaign which was conducted by Kokubunji City in Tokyo in 2018 and dovetailed closely with what the local affectionately refer to as Koku Vege.
These activities are not only designed to consider how to foster efficiency and comfort, but also how to nurture the essential forces that support regions and underpin rich community living, such as trust and creativity.
The Future Living Lab seeks to create future community living by forging lasting ties between people.
In collaboration with Keikyu Corporation, and Scheme Verge, a giant map of the Miura Coast was installed in a space in front of Miurakaigan Station, where people were invited to write their "favourite way to spend the Miura Coast". This project explores the future of communication in the region. The project aims to build a new public property that has great value for both individuals and the region by involving everyone in the creation of it.
This is an experimental citizen-participation vision design in the UK. A Cycle of Change economic vision for local residents and stores to energize city streets through shopping. Armed with this concept, we visited the small town of Odiham in Hampshire. We learned about local town life through field surveys and community dialogues, listened to local citizens’ perceptions, and created a visionary video of the future together.
This project was designed to encourage people to enjoy participating in the Koku Vege initiative to use vegetables and other agricultural products harvested in Kokubunji City, Tokyo. Residents can get information about the vegetables and participating farms from public spaces in Kokubunji and take their desired vegetables to participating restaurants in the city for cooking, and then share their delicious dining experiences on social media as a new way of linking farms, people, and food.
The Bunji Bar is a food rally held across eight shopping streets in Kokubunji City, where you use your ticket to enjoy food and drink while wandering freely around your favorite shops. We joined forces with some of the stores to introduce electronic tickets using blockchain technology in an attempt to create regional connections using an interface that shortens the distance between shops and customers at the time of payment.
This is a joint project with students from Musashino Art University based around the concept of exchanging value that cannot be translated into money, where people get to enjoy sharing food with people they don’t know at locations set up by the students such as the One-bite Post Office or the Kokubunji Bread Plaza at the Kokubunji City Bunbun Walk event. We learned together with the students and citizens about the challenge of creating opportunities for people to exchange words and feelings and the difficulties and enjoyment gleaned from creating small but positive local cycles.
