Updates

2025.9.5

The 33rd Design Fundamentals Seminar: Design as early romanticism: Frantz Schubert’s Project

If an irrepressible impulse toward “somewhere else” was a requirement of Romanticism, then in the early 19th century that impulse had yet to be tainted by the colors of nation or ethnicity. Here lies a source of light, pure and intense, reflecting in myriad ways toward later generations. What did Schubert (1797-1828) propose (Projekt/Entwurf) to us?—With insights from psychoanalysis, care theory, and feminism, we wish to examine this question. Lecturer HORI Tomohei Music Advisor at Sumitomo Life Izumi Hall; Part-time Lecturer at Kyushu University and other institutions. Completed doctoral studies at the University of Tokyo Graduate School (Doctor of Literature). Pursues “soft,” cross-disciplinary music scholarship that engages with other fields. …

2025.1.14

The 32nd Design Fundamentals Seminar: Systems and Resistance: On the Limitations of Design

Design has the perspective of treating things as a “system” functioning rationally, scalable, and replaceable. However, the social movement in Minamata, for example, is also a human resistance against systemic design. By nature, design creates alternative realities and results in the transformation of the creators of those realities. Is it possible to overcome the social distortions that design has been involved in through the power of design?Translated with DeepL.com (free version) Lecturer Tomohide MIZUUCHI(Associate professor, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Center for the Possible Futures) Design researcher, project director, and associate professor at Kyoto Institute of Technology’s Center for the Possible Future .He is engaged in research to rethink the nature …

2024.10.22

The 31st Design Fundamentals Seminar: Into the primordial field:The Linkage of Material, Technique, and Place

The primordial field is a ground where different things are undifferentiated. It is a place to rethink the relationship between people, the plastic arts, and the environment, just before the separation of art, design, architecture, and civil engineering. It’s also a place to consider how the plastic arts can be brought back into the larger biogeochemical cycle. Through concrete practices with ‘fresh soil’ and the insights gained from these practices rather than theory, the project presents the potential relationship between material and form, technique and place, and the possibility of renewing theconcepts of artwork and creation toward post-human art and life at the end of advancing inequality, conflict and climate …

Contents

Outline

Design Fundamentals refer to the accumulation of thoughts that establish design as a discipline through fundamental consideration of what design is, its truth, value (ethics), and aesthetics. To realize this goal, we have established four pillars of research. The first is the practice of stimulating critiques that question design from its roots, the second is the development and practice of basic and common design education, the third is the clarification of design methodology and attempts to systematize it, and the fourth is the promotion of cultural diversity in design. The Center for Design Fundamentals Research aims to envision the future of design through these research projects.