Futures of Learning

I visited the Musashi Institute of Technology Yokohama Campus on a blistering hot summer day. The draw for the day was a panel discussion on “Akiba-kei Culture.” The panelists included Arisa, a popular maid at the renowned maid café, Mai:lish, the three members of an Akiba-kei idol group “Mug Cup,” and a group of three geek boys who are well-known on Twitter Japan and Hatena bookmarks. This event was part of an open campus day, designed to showcase the different university research groups to prospective students and other interested parties. The organizer who put together this event, an unusual one for a university campus, is Naoki Ueno at the Environmental Media Department. Mimi Ito and I attended the group dinner following the panel discussion, and interviewed Naoki over seared bits of Korean barbeque and kim-chee.

Naoki has made a career out of introducing situated learning theory and activity theory to Japanese scholars, and has conducted his own research on the design of educational and workplace environments. He was one of my mentors during graduate school, and was Mimi’s sponsoring researcher during her postdoctoral work in Japan, and is part of an international network of scholars who work at the intersection of technology studies, ethnomethodology, and sociocultural learning theory.

In 2007, he began a new project, funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Titled, “A Base for City-Making Using ICT.” The project aims to create an educational environment tied to urban design and ICTs. The goal of the work is not simply to develop technology or physical infrastructure. Instead, Naoki’s team conducts fieldwork on people’s everyday practice and the information and symbols that flow through certain urban areas, and design ICTs based on this research.  By taking this bottom-up approach to ICT design, Naoki is developing a form of information system design education that is tied to the specifics of social practice.

Naoki’s choice of field sites is also unique. One of his colleague, Ishu Rakusai, developed a browser-based system, NOTA, where NPOs and schools can easily upload records of their activity, such as text and images. They have piloted this system with in the Kohoku New Town area near the university. In addition to this work with the local community, Naoki’s lab has also been engaged with the support of subcultural communities. For example, another student, Tsuyoshi Furusawa, conducted research on graffiti culture in Shibuya. This project is a collaboration with the NPO, Konposition, which is working to reduce illegal graffiti by creating a legal graffiti wall. Konposition was looking for a way of representing their practice of erasing illegal graffiti or painting over it with legal graffiti. Tsuyoshi developed a system where the participants could upload images and locational information about graffiti via mobile phones.

Another example is the work of Koji Sawada, who is developing a web site where fans and minor musicians who are part of the live house scene can connect with one another. By integrating the system design with existing social practice, the goal is to develop a learning environment that exceeds the existing framework of activity.  Naoki explains that the development effort is directed at creating social institutions, resources, and occasions that support access to new practices. In Japan, as elsewhere, Naoki feels that most education about information system design focuses on technology, rather than looking at the concrete contexts in which these systems will be used. By contrast, his team engages directly with end users such as NPO groups and live house participants in order to understand their everyday practice. The students walk the city with these community members and conduct interviews that get at the underlying issues they are grappling with. By experiencing this kind of social research and technology development, the students can integrate both technical and social perspectives on design.

Naoki describes how his biggest challenge has been the coordination between various community groups, local government, university labs, and students. Drawing relationships between these diverse groups, whether they are from the local community or subcultures of geeks, musicians, or otaku, Naoki seems to relish the juxtaposition of different social groups and cultures. This is one the talents that has served him well as a scholarly emissary between Japan and Euro-American intellectual communities that engage in socicultural learning theory. Now he has brought these interests to bear on the education of a new generation of information designers who are building hybrids that cross the boundaries of social and technical systems.