Updates

2025.1.14

The 32nd Design Fundamentals Seminar: System and Resistance: On the Limit 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 designers. Is it possible to overcome the social distortions that design has been involved in through the power of design? Lecturer Tomohide MIZUUCHI(Associate professor, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Center for the Possible Futures) Design researcher and project director / Associate professor at the Kyoto Institute of Technology’s Future Design and Engineering Organization.Engaged in research to rethink the nature of design itself, especially in social innovation, systemic …

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 …

2024.7.1

The 30th Design Fundamentals Seminar: Designing 'place' through Aesthetics

If the work of aesthetics (the study of sense) is to discover and articulate new sensibilities through collaboration with people, objects, and nature, all different from oneself, then collaborative ‘places’ are generated in this process. I would like to consider these places and their design from the perspective of aesthetics. Lecturer Fuminori AKIBA(Professor, Nagoya University) Born 1966, Okayama, Japan. Specialized in aesthetics. He got a Ph.D (Literature) from the Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University (Aesthetics and Art History). Currently, he researches what happiness means in a future society and what aesthetics and art theories can do to achieve it. He published several works including E no Kofuku (Pictorial Happiness: …

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.