PROFILE
Wandering through the World of Design
A Return to the Origin
From graphic design to product design, and from there into the world of computers and eventually education, I have accumulated a wide range of experiences. In a sense, I had been wandering exclusively through artificial worlds. However, through my engagement with nature and agriculture, I came to realize how little I truly knew—and how meaningful it is to deepen one’s understanding of the principles that govern the natural world.
At a time when the lingering embers of Surrealism still glowed and existentialism—championed by Sartre and others—dominated the intellectual scene, my own lack of diligence finally caught up with me. True to form, I failed my university entrance examinations and spent my youth drifting aimlessly through the secondhand bookstores of Kanda, Tokyo. Although existentialism once positioned itself as a counterpoint to progressivism, it does not seem so different from today’s human-centered ideology. Placing human beings at the center of the world and society, then imagining and constructing that world accordingly—how arrogant does such human-centeredness appear now, especially in light of the growing dominance of AI? In Japan, where naturalism and a somewhat archaic animism—a belief in spirits inherent in the land—still persist, this notion has always been difficult to accept.
In the arts as well, a form of so-called “me-ism” continues to gain momentum. This perspective exerts a powerful influence on artistic expression and on the things we create. Taken to an extreme, it results in an obsession with designing solely for humans and envisioning a world made exclusively for human convenience. Cities and societies are shaped according to this logic, giving rise to various distortions and problems.
Yet people and their societies are, at their core, part of the natural world, and human beings are not absolute. There is a growing awareness that new ideas and forms of expression emerge through coexistence with nature, and initiatives such as the SDGs have begun to advocate more explicitly for living in harmony with the environment. One possible path forward lies in pausing to reflect on how we should act and express ourselves—not only through technology or media, but also through the ways we shape society, products, tools, design, and art.
Guided by this conviction, I continue to explore in my daily practice what “The Ecosystem of Design” truly means—that is, what it means for human beings to create and shape the world through design.
Ikuro Choh
Ph.D.,Tokyo University of the Arts
Professor Emeritus, Waseda University