December 9, 2020
Shin Obinata (second-year master's student, Graduate School of Media and Governance; center in the first photo), Rina Kinoshita (third-year student, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies; left in the first photo), and Ryoma Takamori (graduated from the Faculty of Policy Management in September 2020; right in the first photo) from the lab of Professor Hiroya Tanaka of the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies have won the Gold Award in the Student Division of the 21st CS Design Award.
The CS Design Award is a design award for "Cutting Sheet®" hosted by Nakagawa Chemical, Inc. The name of the award comes from the initials of "Cutting Sheet." This 21st iteration marks the award's 38th year, and it is now held biennially. It was started with the aim of promoting activities to share appropriate and highly creative designs with society, and since the first CS Design Award in 1982, it has been held with the participation of many designers and architects.
In the Student Division of the CS Design Award, design proposals that presuppose the use of Cutting Sheet are solicited for each competition. This time, the challenge was to propose a design for the glass surface of "Spiral," a multi-purpose cultural center located in Aoyama, Minato Ward, Tokyo.
In response to this challenge,"Hikari no Nenrin" (Annual Rings of Light), created by Obinata, Kinoshita, and Takamori, was selected for the Gold Award from a total of 194 entries. "Hikari no Nenrin" expresses the 35-year history of Spiral, which is celebrating its 35th anniversary, in the form of "annual rings." The work was praised for how it powerfully drew out the appeal of both the Cutting Sheet material and the Spiral venue, and it was actually installed at the facility.
Comment from Shin Obinata (second-year master's student, Graduate School of Media and Governance)
Spiral is a representative architectural work by Fumihiko Maki, who also designed the SFC campus, and I had visited it many times. The building is simply beautiful, so I aimed for a design that would complement its charm without detracting from it. The shape of the annual rings is a visualization created using statistical formulas based on Spiral's timeline (the number of projects per year). I wanted to directly convey the weight of Spiral's history. It's interesting and very typical of SFC that I happened to be taking a statistics course at SFC, and that knowledge directly led to this design. Although I am not specializing in spatial design, I am delighted that the 3D printing techniques and statistical knowledge I have cultivated at SFC have culminated in this design and earned us such a wonderful award.
Comment from Professor Hiroya Tanaka, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies
In fiscal year 2020, the inability to access the university campus due to the COVID-19 pandemic dealt a major blow to design and art laboratories—especially those focused on the creation of physical "things"—which have "studio (atelier)-style education and research" at their core.
However, even under these circumstances, each student in the Hiroya Tanaka Lab set up a 3D printer at home, and by connecting them through a network, we managed to establish a distributed lab environment.
On top of that, the award-winning ColorFab team quickly devised ways to enhance the quality of their ideas and products even through remote collaboration, and they have been tenaciously putting them into practice.
Their dedication to diligently creating profound and beautiful works and passionately presenting them, even amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, is an exemplary model that I believe will connect to the future. I feel something more than coincidence, something truly significant, in the fact that this activity took place during the commemorative 30th anniversary of SFC.
While expressing our gratitude to all those who have supported us and acknowledged our work, we intend to further accelerate our creative activities to pioneer new forms of "monozukuri" (craftsmanship) that will illuminate the future.
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Issued by: General Affairs Section, Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) Office