“S-meme 06: Focus on Live Music and Drama Performances”
On the Media Axis, each class is an editorial meeting of the students, with the final product being an issue of S-meme, a journal of cultural criticism from a Sendai perspective. This semester, we compiled the sixth issue.
Students handle all aspects of the journal’s production, from research, interviews, fieldwork, and writing to editing, layout and design. This issue focused on the current conditions and past history of live music and drama performances in Sendai.
PBL Studio 2 : Environmental Axis
“Sendai OASIS / Blue-Green Studio 5”
The Environment Axis is carrying out the Sendai OASIS / Blue-Green Studio project, which aims to reintegrate environmental engineering techniques relating to water, earth, air, and energy into the design of human environments, and to explore the potential for conversion from the current concrete- and asphalt-based gray infrastructure to a green infrastructure that effectively capitalizes on ecosystem balance, the environment’s “immune system,” and natural land and water features.
This semester we focused on the potential of geographical features and river systems in Sendai and the Iwadeyama area of Osaki City, examining the possibilities for introduction of mini-power generation facilities employing small amounts of unused hydropower from existing waterways, and other aspects of community development.
PBL Studio 3 : Social Axis
“Memorial Landscape 2”
Since the disaster, the Arahama district of Sendai has been designated a hazardous area unfit for living.
Reconstruction or relocation? Opinions are divided not only among former residents but also among experts, and the outlook for the future remains unclear. In this studio, we worked on a blueprint for a sustainable future and a roadmap for its realization, in which large numbers of outside people join Arahama residents in overcoming differences and achieving restoration using the start-small, grow-large approach applied to revitalization of waning shopping arcades.
In our daily lives, we perform a large number of tasks, services, and exchange of information in preset formats.
A city consists of multifarious systems, and the membranes where these systems connect can be called interfaces. Indeed, a city could be called a fabric of interwoven interfaces. In this class we reexamine the various “city formats” that compose our urban environments from an information-science and visual perspective.
During the 2013 spring semester, we conducted a hands-on case study of the Miyagino Ward Culture Center in Sendai, discussing perspectives and approaches to printed matter, signs, and other media that can achieve an attractive, user-friendly design environment for all users.
Creator in Residence Program
“Capturing the Moment in a Chair”
The Creator in Residence Program invites creative professionals who produce works in collaboration with the students. Students also create their own “documentation works” based on things they noticed while observing the production process.
This semester we invited studio velocity, a team of architects based in Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture. Together we collected flora growing in Sendai and captured it in clear resin, from which we made chairs that seemed to freeze the vegetation in time.
The completed chairs are to be installed as part of studio velocity’s exhibit at the Aichi Triennale international art festival from August 10 to October 27, 2013.
Interactive Lecture
“The Design World as Seen by Editors and Journalists”
Editors provided their views on how processes of communication and evaluation work in the world of design.
Agile Research Project 7 (Special Workshop)
“Disaster Datascape 3”
Continuing with the theme of the 2012 Autumn semester’s ARP5 “Disaster Datascape 2,” we once again considered suitable ways of expressing research data on disasters in visual form and presented these ideas in a practical format, with the goal of ensuring lessons learned from the great earthquake are passed on, and that the findings of research institutions reach a wider audience.
Again obtaining the cooperation of researchers from Tohoku University IRIDeS (International Research Institute for Disaster Science), we aimed to progress from the two-dimensional formats such as posters that had been produced in the past to innovative new formats, and examined the potential of a broad spectrum of media including video and interactive systems.
Agile Research Project 8 (Special Workshop)
“Design of Public Spaces as Integrated Interfaces”
In the future, infrastructure will be expected to contribute not only to technological progress but also to more sophisticated and cosmopolitan urban lifestyles. We examined the potential for public spaces as interfaces between people and information, generating new services and new paradigms of public participation, and fostering the advancement of urban civilization.
