A methodology for implementing Future Design to realize the pluralistic sustainable society

Progress and Results (2022 Year)

Research purpose and content

In the field of sustainability science, much emphasis has been placed on forming visions, and a great deal of research and practice has been accumulated. This is because it is believed that social change is necessary to realize a sustainable society, and that visions that motivate people are driving forces for such change. In fact, in their review article on sustainable visions, Wiek and Iwaniec (2014) listed 10 criteria that a sustainable vision must meet, the ninth of which is that it must be "motivational," that is, it must motivate people toward change. However, there is very limited research that proposes theory-based guidelines on how to form a vision, much less how to form a Motivational vision (van der Helm 2009). The reasons why forming a motivational vision is difficult are obvious. As Conger (1991) states in his study of corporate vision, a vision is a way of looking at things. Therefore, it requires a high level of insight and artistic sense to create it, and the procedures for creating it are difficult to manualize.

However, there is a more fundamental reason: the criterion of "being motivational" is in a trade-off relationship with another criterion of "being shared" (i.e., agreed upon and shared among stakeholders). The more motivational the vision is, the more likely it is that it will be shared only by a small group of people with certain values in society and will not contribute to social change.

Possibly due to this difficulty, the ninth criterion is rarely explicitly referred to by reports of participatory envisioning practices. The report by Iwaniec and Wiek (2014) on the sustainable visioning to update the General Plan of the City of Phoenix, Arizona, is one of such examples. They conducted a series of workshops in which they had participants engage in group discussions to examine their vision for the City of Phoenix. Specifically, they extracted what they termed vision elements from the results of these individual group discussions and they integrated these elements to form a vision. The vision elements were, for example, "responsible use of water resources," "improvement of pedestrian convenience," and "reduction of urban heat. The vision thus formed is highly complete in that it encompasses issues in various policy areas that attracted greater attention of the participants. However, it is not expected that a vision formed in such a manner (i.e., by mechanically extracting only the vision elements while completely ignoring the context in which the individual discussants positioned the vision elements based on their own ideas) will be motivating, and thus this is a regrettable procedure. Similar procedures are widely employed in the field of sustainability science. In a situation of such methodological deficiencies, the transformation to a sustainable society will not proceed successfully.

　With this background, this project sets four objectives. Specifically, in the FY2021 Core FR Plan, the main objective of the project was to use Future Design to model the process of forming a vision that would be both "Motivational" and "Shared". However, during the course of the implementation of FR over the past year, we felt that this objective needed to be slightly modified. There are two reasons for this. First, visioning is a process that requires inspiration, and it is not a process where success can be guaranteed by specific methodologies. Second, it is difficult for visions with the prose form to be shared by a large segment of society, no matter how excellent they are. Instead, a more promising strategy should be to identify what kind of new way of looking at things it represents, and to present a concept that expresses it. Therefore, we would like to redefine Objectives 1 through 2 as follows.

These two objectives are directly related to Future Design. On the other hand, this project also serves as a strategic project, and thus we set Objective 3 as follows. Of course, in implementing Objective 1, collaboration with other projects as mentioned in Objective 3 is necessary, but Objective 3 does not mean such collaboration, but rather, it is to utilize Future Design for the management of the project and to see its effects. Therefore, it is clearly stated as a separate objective from Objective 1.

Challenges and achievements for this year

With regard to Objective 1, we proceeded with research on two points. These are described in turn as (1) and (2).

(1) Qualitative analysis of future design discussions

　As mentioned in "1," previous visioning studies in sustainability science have not sufficiently examined how to identify the originality of participants and extract it as an outcome from the participatory visioning process. Nakagawa's experience to date is that participants in visioning discussions do not exhibit originality in devising vision elements, as Wiek and Iwaniec (2013) suggest, but rather in linking seemingly unrelated vision elements together. Since previous studies have concentrated on extracting vision elements from each discussion while ignoring the context, it is not surprising that the originality of the participants has been reduced to a minimum. In contrast, the idea that inspired this project was to identify the ways in which the participants in the discussions found connections between multiple vision elements, and to develop concepts that directly reflect those connections. This is explained below, along with specific examples.

On April 22, 2022, Kentaro Hayashi and Kazuyo Matsuyae held an online Future Design Discussion. The topic of the discussion was as follows.

The full text of the vision statement that was created as a result of the analysis of that discussion is shown in Figure 2. This text shows that the first through second paragraphs refer to "a system of sustainable nitrogen use" and "a system of sustainable energy use”. These are what Wiek and Iwaniec (2013) call vision elements. These vision elements themselves are not likely to be particularly new. Rather, the originality of this team was demonstrated in the discovery that there is a point of contact between these two systems, and that "ammonia combustion technology" is that point of contact. To express this discovery, Nakagawa identified the concept of "ammonia combustion technology bridging sustainable nitrogen utilization systems and energy utilization systems”. In general, however, development of a concept means much more than simply proposing such a short phrase, according to qualitative research (more precisely, the Grounded Theory Approach; GTA). Therefore, from the second year of the FR onward, the methodology for extracting concepts from visioning discussions will be refined in accordance with the guidelines provided by GTA. The biggest achievement of this year was the discovery that GTA can be used in visioning research.

(2) Artificial Intelligence Analysis of Future Design Discussions

　Prior to the start of this project, Nakagawa had developed a methodology to visualize the flow of discussions for visioning, to identify the point in time when originality was most demonstrated in the group, and to create a vision narrative on the basis of this. This year, this dialogue-mapping method was applied to the study described in (1), and a vision narrative was created, as shown in Figure 1, where nodes numbered 1 through 106 correspond to each of the 106 intercepts into which Nakagawa himself divided the transcribed results of the discussion. The arrow from one node (say A) to another (say B) indicates that the analyst (Nakagawa in this case) interpreted that statement B was made in response to statement A.

　The creation of this dialogue map is a very time-consuming task and requires a deep reading of the transcribed results, so it is not a versatile method. Therefore, we developed a new method this year that uses artificial intelligence to automatically extract relationships among nodes to create a dialogue map, which is then used by humans to create vision sentences.

　This semi-automatic creation of dialogue maps using artificial intelligence was realized through joint research with Assistant Professor Takanori Matsui of Osaka University. The strength of similarity between any pairs of two in 106 intercepts was quantified by the artificial intelligence that learned a large number of documents on sustainable society. Then, by identifying the pairs with higher similarity, arrows between nodes were defined and a dialogue map was created. The results are shown in Figure 2. In addition, a human (in this case, Nakagawa) created vision sentences based on this Figure 2, and the results are shown in Figure 3.　Finding out what differences exist between the dialogue map created by the human and the one created by the AI is an important issue for the second year of FR and beyond. More specifically, the only relationship between intercepts that can be identified for AI is similarity. Humans, on the other hand, have the ability to perceive a much greater variety of relationships. We would like to examine in the next and subsequent years how a dialogue map that ignores the diversity of such relationships can be utilized.

　Next, we will discuss the results related to Objective 4. At the beginning of this project, we had intended to synthesize the knowledge of completed projects by means of Future Design. Therefore, we held a future design discussion with the cooperation of the following two of the three leaders who participated in the first seminar on completed projects in FY2022, and Kentaro Hayashi, the leader of the Sustai-N-able project.

　Dr. Takakazu Yumoto (Project title: "Historical and Cultural Examination of Human-Nature Interrelationships in the Japanese Archipelago" 2006-2010)

　Dr. Junko Hanyu (project title: "Community-based Small-scale Economic Activities and Long-term Sustainability: An Approach from Historical Ecology," 2014-2016)

　However, this attempt was not successful, as there was a rather large gap between the themes of the three projects: when the three collaborators tried to form a single vision (a vision of society in 2050), they were forced to work together to create a vision that was an extension of one of the three projects. This was because the remaining two were forced to step in. While FD may be effective in creating a more fertile vision for each project with the help of non-specialized researchers, we judged that it was not fully adequate as a methodology for the integration of knowledge.

Because of this, we decided to take a different approach to the professors who participated in the Second Completed Project Seminar. In other words, we decided to interview each leader individually in order to clarify "how the experience of being involved in RIHN as a project leader was positioned in his/her life and what kind of experience it was.

Of the three professors who participated in the second Completed project seminar, Prof. Takayuki Shiraiwa could not be mentioned in section 2 due to space limitations, so we will give a summary in this column. He believes that Hokkaido needs to strengthen its ties with China and Russia in terms of trade and human exchange in order for Hokkaido to become an independent entity that contributes to Japan in the future, rather than existing as an underpopulated area or a burden on Japan. And he believes that it is the role of academics to contribute to the strengthening of such connections by academically assigning meaning to Hokkaido. In fact, the results of the Shiraiwa project can also be interpreted as providing a story that connects Hokkaido, China, and Russia. From this, a research question could be formulated: "What is the process by which the elucidation of natural scientific phenomena specific to a particular region gives social meaning to that region and influences society? Whether or not this satisfies conditions 1 through 5 has not yet been verified and will be an issue to be addressed in the following year or later.

  One of the points for reflection this year was the lack of sufficient collaboration among the project members. This project aims to develop a rather special methodology called Future Design. Additionally, it is required to contribute to the integration of knowledge of RIHN. In such a project, Nakagawa was not able to clearly envision the kind of relationship that would maximize the expertise of the researchers who are members of the project from outside the Institute.

  However, we have some idea of the path to solving this problem over the next two years. By setting Objective 4 this year, it became clear what kind of relationship this project should establish with the terminated projects. One of the terminated projects, Prof. Shin Muramatsu's project "Impact of Megacities on the Global Environment" (terminated in FY2014), had Hironori Kato (University of Tokyo), who is also a member of this project. Therefore, we have selected the Muramatsu project as the most primary case study of the terminated projects to be conducted under Objective 4, and would like to strengthen our collaborative relationship with the members of the project.

Future tasks

The implementation plan for each year, including the next, is outlined in section 8 of this report.

More specifically, for Objective 1, we will complete the development of a methodology to create vision narratives and extract versatile concepts from it. The extent to which the procedure can be replaced by artificial intelligence will also be clarified.

　For Objective 2, we will design a discussion experiment to answer the research question posed in 5(3).

　Objective 3 will continue to be pursued in parallel with the progress of the Sustai-N-able project.

　For Objective 4, interviews will be conducted with all leaders who will participate in the next year's completed project seminar.

Of Objectives 1 through 4, the greatest uncertainty regarding feasibility is probably in Objective 4. This is because it is unknown whether we will be able to obtain agreement from the terminated project leaders to collaborate on research to answer the research questions that Nakagawa proposes to the terminated project. In this regard, Nakagawa will strengthen ties with terminated projects with which it can collaborate, such as the tie with the Akiko Sakai project (with the help of Dr. Reiichiro Ishii, who used to be the sub leader of her project) and the tie with the Shin Muramatsu project with the cooperation of Hironori Kato.