December 24, 2020
Color Fab, a design engineer team consisting of Shin Obinata (a second-year master's student at the Graduate School of Media and Governance, center in photo), Ryoma Takamori (a September 2020 graduate of the Faculty of Policy Management, right in photo), and Rina Kinoshita (a third-year student at the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, left in photo) from the lab of Professor Hiroya Tanaka of the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, has won the Grand Prix at the Toyama Design Competition 2020.
The Toyama Design Competition began in 1994 as a competition premised on commercialization and has produced numerous hit products by matching designers with companies in Toyama Prefecture. Starting this fiscal year, the competition themes are based on challenges faced by companies. This year, in light of the current situation where the succession of the coloring business is jeopardized by the health and financial burdens on artisans, the competition solicited design proposals for "adding color."
In response to this theme, Color Fab proposed "Sekisai," a new method of creating color using a 3D printer. The Toyama Design Competition began in 1994 as a competition premised on commercialization and has produced numerous hit products by matching designers with companies in Toyama Prefecture. Starting this fiscal year, the competition themes are based on challenges faced by companies. This year, in light of the current situation where the succession of the coloring business is jeopardized by the health and financial burdens on artisans, the competition solicited design proposals for "adding color."
"Sekisai" was selected for the Grand Prix from a total of 254 entries. Its novelty in manufacturing and design was highly praised because it unifies the modeling and coloring processes, making it possible to preserve the value of color without the associated burdens, and also enables delicate color expressions that cannot be achieved by hand-painting.
At the Toyama Design Competition 2020 Exhibition, held from December 4 to 10 after the final judging, the nine finalist works, including "Sekisai," and other prize-winning works were displayed.
(Second and third photos)
A vase created with Sekisai
It has an iridescent effect (color changes depending on the viewing angle) due to its fine structure and color scheme.
Comment from Shin Obinata (2nd-year master's student, Graduate School of Media and Governance)
The Toyama Design Competition is a product design competition with a long history, and the fact that a proposal like ours from the new design field of 3D printing was recognized feels like a major turning point. It made me realize once again that the very framework of design is expanding.
I usually do my creative work within the lab, so it was fascinating to step outside the university and see how the actual challenges faced by the manufacturing industry overlap with our research area, revealing new possibilities. This proposal will now move toward commercialization in collaboration with companies in Toyama Prefecture, and I am very much looking forward to it.
Comment from Professor Hiroya Tanaka, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies
In an article on the same team winning the Gold Award in the Student Division of the 21st CS Design Award, I commented, "We have been developing a distributed lab environment by having each student set up a 3D printer at home and connecting them via a network." With this, it seemed that a "production system for creation" was secured for the time being.
However, at the same time, there is a "quality of ideas" that can never be obtained without actually visiting the site or without the experience of "movement." Since the fall semester, this team, having deeply understood this, made several trips to Toyama with the utmost care, achieving significant growth each time. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the judges and everyone involved in the Toyama Design Competition.
The relationships not only between online and offline, but also home and away, staying and moving, individual and team, and digital and analog are also very important and delicate issues for demonstrating design creativity, and in modern times, these issues cannot be avoided. I am sincerely proud of the creativity woven by these three individuals, who continuously adjusted all of these complex relationships to the best possible condition, ultimately winning the top prize in the General Division and the right to commercialize their product. I look forward to their future success.
Posted by: General Affairs Section, Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) Office