Dante Lising
Global Design Initiative
The Global Design Initiative, founded by five internationally oriented Art and Design Universities, unites like-minded people who believe in new approaches to dialogue and exchange, including global design education leaders.
GDI Students Workshop
I was invited to the 6th Students’ Workshop at Musashino Art University, Japan (March 6th - 10th, 2023). Each university sent three students to explore and collaborate.
Group Members:
Hsu Shien
TaoCarlo Hatke
Aditi Krishna Neti
Sakura Niina
Dante Lising
The Brief
Cross Cultural Collaboration
Over five days, we explored the “strangeness” of Jimbocho, a Tokyo neighborhood famous for secondhand bookstores. Our goal was to use our diverse backgrounds and cultural knowledge to craft a provocative prototype or artifact that reflected our experience of this unique place.
Our Response
Through interviews and time spent in Jimbocho, we identified a “strange” feeling of intimacy in the bookshops there. The bookshops were mostly passed down through generations of the owners’ family, we found that this closeness to their personal life was reflected in the objects and space in the stores. Because of this, it was difficult to identify their personal boundaries and whether we had been intruding in these stores, as many of the bookshop owners lived in their shops as well.
Creating an Alternate Narrative
Intimacy & Antimacy
Our defined narrative was ‘antimacy,’ representing a contradiction we explored in Jimbocho. Through photos of bookstores, we visualized how ‘antimacy’ manifested in that context, revealing itself as an antagonist to intimacy.
A global capitalist enterprise has pushed into Jimbocho.Strange intruders appear around its streets and stores disrupting urban social space, mimicking and twisting its intimate characteristics.An antagonist to intimacy emerges...
ANTIMACY.
