From accepting the future we are given to selecting the future we want: Visions of the future born out of designer-researcher collaboration

The desire to do work that can contribute to society and the world

Fukumaru: When I was in high school, those around me were mostly science students, so I assumed I too would go on to study engineering. Then, just when I was struggling to come up with a specific image of my work beyond the engineering department, I happened to learn about the designer profession. Even though I had not even so much as drawn a picture up to that time, I single-mindedly set out to become a designer, going on to the department of design and conducting research on “inclusive design,” designing things that are usable by people with all kinds of needs, backgrounds and experiences. Rather than being simply self-satisfied with my work, I wanted to design for people and happenings that have been marginalized by society. Having gained from my research much knowledge about social infrastructure and social justice, around the time of graduation I became interested in Hitachi, with its focus on Social Innovation.

Matsuda: I studied communications engineering in the department of engineering. Specializing in image recognition, whereby text on a sign can be recognized from a digital photo, I did research close to the kind I work on now at Hitachi. At the same time, when considering a career, I had a strong desire to “create something that will make life more convenient for people.” For that reason, I did not limit my scope of possible workplaces to a laboratory but considered also development departments and other such options. In my job hunting, however, I saw some of the results of social implementation by Hitachi, and became convinced that it was the researcher who got to experience the excitement of first starting to build something. So I changed my first choice to working in a research lab. Joining Hitachi in 2009, my research focused entirely on biometric authentication and finger vein authentication. This is still my main area, even though I am currently involved in this Expo project.

Fukumaru: I likewise joined the company in 2009, so I guess that makes us contemporaries. [laughs]
My first assignment was doing design work for a railway service development project. Taking over a project from a senior colleague whom I still hold in high esteem, I designed the graphical user interface (GUI) for a display at train station ticket gates that intuitively notifies of delays and other problems. This project let me experience design from smartphone apps to operation management systems and the like. Over time, I became interested in other areas besides train operations, and was able to become involved in “vision design,” design activities for thinking about the ideal forms of social systems. By realistically depicting theoretical scenes from everyday life, services, new cityscapes and other futuristic visions of life in “Society 5.0 ” advocated by the Japanese Government, we stimulated discussions about what will be demanded of future social systems. After that, I spent three years assigned to an overseas office in the U.K., before taking up my current position.

Taking part in an Expo project for imagining the future

Matsuda: While I was doing research on biometric authentication, which was more or less aimed at individual customers like BtoB or BtoBtoC, I was assigned to the Expo project. My honest reaction at the time was, “Huh? Why me?” [laughs] That’s because I had no previous involvement in this kind of event aimed at people outside the company. As I learned later, it appears I was selected because ours is an organization that wants us to build up our careers through experience in many different fields.

Fukumaru: The occasion for me was being asked by a senior colleague, after returning from the U.K., “There’s this Expo project. How about it?” This was even before the official mascot MYAKU-MYAKU had been decided, but I recall my curiosity being aroused.

Matsuda: After Fukumaru-san joined the project, when they were considering how Hitachi should go about envisaging the future society, the decision was made to have the feasibility studied by a group including researchers, and we were added to the project. I guess the thinking was that for the project to be carried out with confidence, they wanted it to be advanced from both the designer and researcher sides.

Fukumaru: At an Expo, a place where many people come expecting to learn about the society of tomorrow, I wanted to avoid simply showing off Hitachi’s existing products. What I came up with instead is, while cooperating with Matsuda-san and the other researchers on deepening understanding of Hitachi’s leading-edge research and technologies, to focus not on showing the future to be achieved by that technology, but on creating scenes that would excite people about the future of their own life and cities, while they used each of the technologies to create their own new ways of living.

Merging technology seeds with future imaginings

Matsuda: We had to know which among the latest technologies of Hitachi could be used toward realizing the future envisaged by Fukumaru-san and his fellow designers. To that end, we began interviewing people in the Research and Development Group about the kinds of technologies in Hitachi. My responsibility was conducting interviews in the Kokubunji and Yokohama labs, concentrating on the IT field. There were other researchers taking part in the project, who were in charge of interviews and so on in Ibaraki. We went around asking, “Are there any technologies you would like to show off at the Expo?” The people we interviewed would then recommend others to talk with, as we continued along the chain listening to one after another. I alone interviewed more than 20 people, with the total number talked with exceeding 50. After summarizing our findings, we then carried on talks and studies with Fukumaru-san and his design team members.

Fukumaru: You really did interview quite a large number of researchers. Thanks to those efforts, we were able to see the depth and breadth of Hitachi’s advanced technologies, for which I am grateful.

Matsuda: We heard a lot of exciting stories. Hitachi certainly has a large number of technologies, and while realizing that this is a strength, I also felt that even for us researchers, there are fields different from ours that are difficult to understand. It made me aware once again that another mission of this event is to convey these technologies to the world in readily understandable ways.

Fukumaru: While there had been many opportunities up to now for looking at documents that were simply a list of technology milestones, when asking about technologies of the future, I had not been able to imagine the aspirations of the researchers themselves about their technology. Talking with Matsuda-san, we would say things like, “That researcher was quite the talker,” or “You could feel the amazing passion.” By directly talking with the individual researchers in charge of a technology, we were able to get a sense of their imagination and aspirations that cannot be understood just by looking at materials explaining the technology. I think we were able to think deeply about how technology can change people’s lives, or how we would like it to change things through technology.

Matsuda: If you try to explain things by making a list, it’s really hard to convey this sort of thing.

Fukumaru: To give an example, a drone can be used to transport things; but if you look only at the outcome, it could just as well have been carried by truck. When talking only about the technology, we tend to overlook the perspective of how using drones will change people’s lives or that of workers. About the metaverse as well, they say “It has an individuality different from reality”; but what I would like to grasp is what kinds of changes, specifically, are in store for people’s lives and values. What we decided was to have the researchers and designers deepen our understanding of the technology, and carry on thorough discussions about the future that will change with technology, and that people will be able to change. In retrospect, it seems like our task was a matter of looking for places where vision and technology mesh and where they fail to mesh.

Going back and forth between the cyber and physical worlds to create our own future

Fukumaru: There were many twists and turns even after that. We started out by thinking of future life scenes in terms of “business fields.” Things like, the future of mobility, or the future of energy. We consumers, however, do not view the world in neat categories like “mobility” or “energy.” What’s more, people who think only about energy day after day are rare; our interests are more likely to go off in many directions. Rather than business fields, we therefore decided to consider the future in lifestyle contexts like “entertainment,” “purchasing,” and “working,” and searched for places where there were affinities between Hitachi’s technologies and those of our joint-exhibitor KDDI.

At this Expo, Hitachi and KDDI are jointly exhibiting in the Future City pavilion. Regarding the form of the new city Society 5.0 is aiming for, we therefore planned an exhibit in which Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are seen as central to the technology. In other words, analyzing data not just in the real world but in the cyber world as well, you go about changing the real world.

Matsuda: If companies one-sidedly present something new, however, there is a risk of inviting a strong backlash. The visitors to the exhibit will end up not as actors in creating lifestyles, but as users of the technology given them.

Fukumaru: That’s why at the Expo, we made the exhibit system one where visitors select life scenes in the future they desire, thereby creating a relationship between technology and their own future. What we want is for them to experience becoming actively involved in practices they themselves feel are good, as a result of advances in technology.

Matsuda: How can technologies be made to have a soft landing, and how can these be skillfully enjoyed and accepted? What would be interesting is to make use of something like CPS, and before actually implementing a technology in society, have visitors envisage use cases through simulations and ask them for their opinions. The idea here is, within the framework of a citizen-participatory society, to build a future society together while getting the views of the people involved.

Fukumaru: To be honest, there is no value or surprise in the fact itself of a drone flying or of going shopping in the metaverse. I think it’s important to depict not the form of technology outside the user, but a vision of people using technology to themselves create their own way of life. What we tried hard to do was to provide an experience of being agents in choosing your own desired future.

Matsuda: While this is my own personal view, if we were to get the opinions of all the people experiencing the pavilion, or even going so far as to get the opinions of every citizen, it would not be possible to reflect all those views in the world of the future. What I would like to do away with is the situation up to now whereby people think, “even if people’s opinions are gathered, they will not be reflected in the end.” At this Expo, we are using CPS in a decision-making project. By having people experience in a cyber world the process when views are adopted and when they are not, we will show the arrival finally at a conclusion most people can accept as reasonable. In other words, we will be able to make the decision-making process visible.

This is called “stakeholder buy-in”; that is, even if an opinion was not adopted due to cost considerations or in comparison with other options, by being able to present the result in an explainable form, the way citizens accept the conclusion should change even if the result is the same. By using technologies like generative AI, we assume these things can be conveyed to citizens in a readily understandable way.

Fukumaru: Yes, this is another way CPS are being used in the exhibit experience. Our thinking is that by looking at both the choices of the people in the Expo pavilion and the results in virtual spaces, as one person’s choice stimulates the creativity of others, without focusing only on the differences, it should be possible to create a future acceptable to large numbers of people.

Matsuda: After getting people’s opinions, even if an opinion was not adopted, there is value in having them understand that their opinion was factored in during the consideration process.

Fukumaru: We want to provide an experience such that when people leave the Expo site, their own choices and their vision of the kind of future they want to see will have been shaken, in a good sense, and their way of looking at everyday scenes will have changed just a bit.

Leaving room for stopping and thinking

Fukumaru: There are times when recommending something to another person will have the opposite effect. A dialogue process would therefore seem to be important for ensuring that living human beings, who make choices and carry them out as their own affairs, do not get ignored.

Matsuda: On the technology side, we figured it would be important for the simulations to have high resolution. If the accuracy is low, the simulations themselves will lack credibility. Making highly accurate simulations so that people are convinced they are like the real thing should make them feel more confident about trying them out. In that sense, with CPS, the accuracy of the simulations is the key point.

Fukumaru: That’s true. At the same time, we have to tread carefully when it comes to the connection between technology and people, lest we end up making people subservient to technology. Even if the simulation is highly accurate, people will feel they have to watch it, or feel compelled to try it. Toward actual social implementation, before deciding the options to be presented to users, we need to try it ourselves and make sure there is a mechanism for experiencing the feedback loop.

Matsuda: Working on making something with a designer like Fukumaru-san, there are many views that serve as useful references. [laughs] Like the perspective that, instead of just trying to wow the visitors, we need to have them see the exhibit in terms of expectations for their own future. Thoughts like these make me feel I am benefitting from stimulations that would not be possible if I were trying to build something as a researcher alone.

Fukumaru: From my standpoint as a designer, working with a researcher, every day is filled with amazement at the technology and the things that can be done with it. I mean, wow! You can do that analysis, or that estimation, with such limited data! [laughs] Beyond simply being amazed by such things, I am always thinking about how people can manifest them to the world as something of value, and how to gain a multifaceted view of happiness from a human perspective.

Matsuda: Our exhibit at the Expo lets people experience choosing their own future, but this is not something we are doing just for the sake of the Expo. It will be a big success if it becomes the occasion for visitors taking an interest in corporate activities, identifying with their aims, and becoming involved together in tackling future issues. A good thing about Hitachi is that along with carrying out development aimed at the present, it also allocates funds and invests in initiatives like this, looking to the future, right?

Fukumaru: For sure. If I can add one more thought, being involved in development as a designer, there are many times when we find ourselves in situations where it is difficult to pause and think. This is especially the case with products and services having strict milestones. For example, I designed the service providing train operation information, but no matter how skillfully I designed it, it could not reduce the number of accidents themselves. It occurred to me during this development project that having the room to stop and think, based on this feeling of incongruity and things I notice, is one of the appeals of working in a design organization in the Research and Development Group.

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