The Global Design Initiative

The Global Design Initiative was founded by the Global Design Faculty, driven by five internationally and globally oriented Art and Design Universities and Institutes. It brings together like-minded people, such as global design education leaders who believe in new approaches to dialogue and exchange.

I was invited to the sixth student workshop, held from the 6th to the 10th of March 2023, at Musashino Art University, Japan. Each university was able to send three of their students to explore and collaborate with one another. Over the course of the workshop, I had the pleasure of working with Hsu Shien Tao, Carlo Hatke, Aditi Krishna Neti, and Sakura Niina, each from a respective university: Shih Chien University, Cologne International School of Design, La Salle College of the Arts, and Musashino Art University.

Over the course of five days, we were tasked with observing “strangeness” in Jimbocho, a neighborhood known for its secondhand bookstores in Tokyo. We were then instructed to keep our diverse backgrounds in mind and apply our cumulative understanding of cultures to create an artifact or “provo-type” (provocative prototype) to reflect our experience of strangeness in Jimbocho.

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’ families; we found that this closeness to their personal lives was reflected in the objects and spaces 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. We defined our narrative as “antimacy,” which we described as everything that was in contradiction to what we saw Jimbocho to be. To express this narrative, we took photos of the bookstores and visualized what we thought “antimacy” would look like in that context.

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.