A "Pop" in Subspace | Jin Nakazawa, Assistant to the Dean of the Graduate School of Media and Governance / Director, Shonan Fujisawa ITC / Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies
2020.09.08
No one has mentioned it in this year's "Okashira Nikki" (Dean's Diary), so perhaps it's a secret, but this year marks the 30th anniversary of SFC's founding. Compared to about 25 years ago when I was a student, the tree trunks at SFC have grown thicker, and the number of living creatures has increased. I never noticed it in the past, but in recent years, it's a safe bet to consider the end of the rainy season as the first day you hear two or more cicadas chirping simultaneously at SFC. There are also many rhinoceros beetles and stag beetles. In a typical year, I often see students from the junior and senior high schools, besides myself, looking up at the sawtooth oak trees in search of these beetles. Ants get into the labs in the Delta Building, where my office is located, which I believe is a design flaw. We also occasionally see "silent insects that look like flattened Emma field crickets," but frogs and huntsman spiders prey on them. Just a moment ago, a "shogun" (a huntsman spider, pictured) paid a visit to my personal office. It's very reassuring.
While the activities of these creatures have continued unabated this year, human activity on campus has unfortunately remained largely stagnant. During the spring semester, we held classes online and hosted the Tanabata Festival in a virtual space. While we discovered new challenges, I believe these efforts were very successful. However, this seems to have only partially replicated the human activities that take place on campus. In student surveys regarding online classes, many comments, especially from new students, expressed a desire to experience the campus physically. This suggests that during the spring semester, we were unable to provide that certain something students gain by being physically present on campus. I feel that the new form of the campus in the so-called new normal era is to think about what that "something" is and, to put it figuratively, create it with a "pop" in a "subspace." I have a feeling that the universities that will survive are those that not only utilize "online communication" over the internet and visually constructed 3D "virtual campuses" but also effectively and comprehensively deploy many new mechanisms in addition to them. This is because the physical campus and the subspace campus can be expected to complement each other, enhancing the university's resilience and student satisfaction.
A subspace campus is not bound by time and space, so you can instantly meet anyone, no matter who, when, or where they are. Applying this quality to classes, students were able to attend classes over the internet from anywhere during this year's spring semester. Furthermore, on-demand classes are, in a sense, a way to break free from the time axis. If that's the case, it seems it should be possible in a subspace campus to at least specify a past academic year to take a class—for example, taking Professor Aiso's class from the 1990 academic year and receiving two credits. The SFC GC has classes from the 2002 academic year onward archived, so we could make better use of them right away. On this premise, faculty members would be teaching students of the future, which, while expanding our dreams, also seems to increase the things we need to consider. It also seems important to create in subspace the roles that were fulfilled by the spaces between classrooms, such as the area around Kamo Pond or the cafeteria. It would be fun to have a mechanism that enables the kind of chance encounters between students that happen by Kamo Pond, but across space. We can create the atmosphere of a subspace campus with features that allow the green of the trees to catch your eye and be soothing, or let you hear the voice of a faculty member teaching in the distance to feel a sense of breadth and liveliness, or even mechanisms that reproduce that certain smell or the taste of the cafeteria food. If we pile up a lot of these fantasies, we could probably create something quite good.
Returning to the original topic, in the latter half of last year, we were discussing various things we wanted to do for the milestone of SFC's 30th anniversary. The fall semester will be a time to recall these ideas and implement them as much as possible. In addition to these various things, if we could do something significant enough to insist that the opening of a subspace campus is a 30th-anniversary project, that would be very SFC-like. The results of the online class survey also show that various initiatives were undertaken during the spring semester. The subspace campus is probably under construction right now, and perhaps it's already almost complete.