SFC Should Always Be PROTO—From ORF 2014 | Katsuhiko Ogawa (Executive Director, Keio Research Institute at SFC)
December 10, 2014
From November 17 to 22, SFC's ORF (Open Research Forum) 2014 was held at Tokyo Midtown. This year, with Akira Wakita (Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies), an SFC graduate, serving as the executive committee chairman, the ORF had a different style than before.
One of these changes was the ORF Week. Previously, it was just a two-day exhibition, but this time it became a week-long event, with a symposium and an eve-of-event festival in the first half, along with the exhibition in the second half. At the eve-of-event festival, there was a live performance by the idol group PIP (Platonics Idol Platform), led by Satoshi Hamano, who is also an SFC graduate. Mixed in with the young people waving glow sticks, some of the older men and women seeing an idol concert for the first time were moved to tears by the girls' earnest dedication (this is true).
Another highlight was that the exhibition platform was a wooden framework. This was designed by executive committee member Shohei Matsukawa (Full-time Lecturer, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies) using his own custom software to meet the exhibition space requests of each laboratory. While I felt sorry for the booths that became a bit cramped, it was very impressive to see the students making various creative uses of the advantages of the wooden structure.
The exhibition by Shohei Matsukawa's laboratory was beyond imagination. Instead of wood, they built pipe scaffolding that reached the venue's ceiling, with printed materials flowing down from the top. The power of the exhibit was one thing, but what was more surprising was that the people assembling the scaffolding during setup, whom I thought were professional contractors, were actually students from Matsukawa's lab. I was particularly captivated by how cool the female students looked.
Speaking of female students, the Excellence Award at the student research presentations hosted by the Keio SFC Academic Society went to Nana Takamatsu for her comedy act. Starting with a routine where she wears a high school girl's uniform and satirizes students from elite girls' high schools, she makes people laugh with a slightly twisted take on modern society. Her booth was surrounded by a huge crowd, and I felt a little sorry for the neighboring booth. There are quite a few entertainers at SFC these days, but the way she turns her performance into research might be what makes her a uniquely SFC-style comedian.
Now, in my laboratory (the Ogawa Lab), we held a workshop to create internet radio content together. Students conducted surprise interviews with foreigners walking in Roppongi, asking them what they like and dislike about the area. The recorded conversations are then attached to a digital map of Roppongi. When you go to the interview locations with your smartphone, you can hear some "Good News" about Japan that you might not have noticed before.
Listening to the students' English on the radio, it's even better than that of the foreigners they interviewed. Of course, many of the foreigners are not native English speakers, and many of the students are returnees who have lived abroad, but for students like them, slogans like "globalization" seem unnecessary.
Finally, I would like to touch on the theme of ORF 2014. The overall theme conceived by Wakita and his team was "PROTO-UNIVERSITY." PROTO, I'm told, is a word that signifies an undifferentiated state before a structure becomes subdivided and optimized. SFC 24 years ago was likely born from just such a state. Today's SFC platform has been built based on the vision proposed in its genesis. I'm surely not the only one who felt the excitement of that genesis in the talk given by Professor Hideo Aiso at the session on the future of the university. If Professor Aiso is the "zeroth-generation" leader, then the current figures like Kawazoe, Murai, and Tokuda are surely the second generation, and we could say we are now in the era of the 2.5 generation, where the baton is being passed to Wakita and his peers. Miraisozojuku (Institute for Designing the Future) is a new vision for SFC. However, if asked what kind of university I want to create, or what kind of SFC I want to create, I would answer, "I want SFC to always be PROTO."