Life Style by Design Research Unit

Established : Oct. 1, 2018

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Overview

With increasing longevity and the diversification of working practices in Japan, new and different needs are being created across diverse areas of modern living, such as a pension, insurance, medical care, a retirement age system, even meal times and their ingredients.

Therefore, it is necessary to define this new lifestyle with multi-disciplinary, collaboration amongst citizens-industry-government-academia to evolve existing lifestyles to better satisfy the changing needs of the people, and sustain improved QOL.

The mission of our Lifestyle by Design research unit is to explore an holistic lifestyle design taking into consideration social factors (home, work, economic, disaster prevention, politics,...) and emotional factors (community, hobbies, music, purpose,...) as well as medical factors (meal, exercise, mental, sleep, disease, life) that all contribute to improved personal well-being.

Thus the health of individuals today should not be only assessed by conventional medical methods, because well-being is a multi-dimensional construct.

Life Style by Design understands the value of stimulating connected communities with deliberative, intelligent and participatory engagement (community capital) to generate social value. Consequently, at the outset, Life Style by Design has deliberately bridged the academic and commercial divide bringing different partners into the initiative. In so doing we wish to innovate and evaluate the impact of new products and services that might be a practical response to the evolving lifestyle needs.

Thus, Life Style by Design is strategically demanding questioning the status-quo, but with its partners is able to objectively evaluate new initiatives, and drive executional excellence to have a material and sustainable impact.

We will create a market-driven innovation ecosystem that empowers people to enhance their well-being and improve QOL. Changing consumption patterns will contribute to establishing new life and life-related enterprises. Our focus is Japan, but success within our rapidly aging demography can be a catalyst for growth in exporting proven solutions. The process of Design Thinking essentially condenses to a concentration on experiential (sensory), emotional and integral (cross-sector) intelligence.

The need for new designs in lifestyles is also recognized with respect to government policies, and we will deliberately engage with both central and local governments, in particular, to guide understanding and acceptance of change.

AS such, we will seek to evaluate optimum lifestyle design by establishing and analyzing different social experiments with holistic citizens-industry-government-academia collaboration.

Director

  • Hideaki Shiroyama (Professor, Vice Director of Policy Alternatives Research Institute/ Graduate School of Public Policy / Professor, Graduate School of Public Policy / Graduate Schools of Law and Politics)

Members

  • Hiromichi Kimura (Project Professor, Policy Alternatives Research Institute)
  • Toshiya Watanabe (Professor, Vice Director of Policy Alternatives Research Institute/ Executive Director and Executive Vice President, the University of Tokyo/ Professor, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (Additional Post))
  • Hiroko Akiyama (Project Professor, Institute of Gerontology)
  • Yuji Furui (Project Professor, Policy Alternatives Research Institute / Visiting Professor,Jichi Medical University)

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