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.

Progress and Results (2024 Year)

Research purpose and content

Trends in Research on Sustainability Transitions

Research aimed at understanding the process by which societies transition to sustainability and identifying approaches to intervene in this process is referred to as sustainability transitions research. According to Köhler et al. (2019), who reviewed research in this field over the past few decades and projected future directions, research in this area began around the turn of the millennium and has since grown exponentially.

The origin of these studies can be traced back to the work of Geels (2002), who proposed the Multi-level Perspective. According to Geels, a societal transition occurs when the regime involving the key actors of that society undergoes restructuring. Actors not participating in the regime engage in social experiments, which accumulate and are imitated over time, leading to the formation of large societal movements. These movements exert pressure on the regime, forcing its restructuring. Additionally, changes in the external environment of the regime (such as international circumstances or shifts in people's values) can directly influence the regime’s reconfiguration or provide indirect support for social experiments, thus contributing to the transition. Since Geels (2002), research has built on this theoretical framework, addressing specific issues such as the process of accumulating social experiments, the geographical expansion of these experiments, and the political processes involved in the reconfiguration of existing regimes into new ones.

Geels (2002) adopts the definition of a regime proposed by Rip and Kemp (1998): “A technological regime is the rule-set or grammar embedded in a complex of engineering practices, production process technologies, product characteristics, skills and procedures, ways of handling relevant artefacts and persons, ways of defining problems; all of them embedded in institutions and infrastructures.” In this research project, while taking into account the definition proposed by Holtz (2008), we independently modify Rip and Kemp's (1998) definition as follows:

Although not explicitly stated in this definition, this research project will also consider the interactions between actors and ecosystems in addition to the interactions between the actors themselves. Actors engage in activities while sharing implicit rules on the visible foundations of infrastructure and social institutions. These implicit rules can also be referred to as "culture." However, the term "culture" has too many meanings and does not serve as a specific guideline for academic research, so its use has been avoided.

The regime, as defined here, is implicit, and it remains largely invisible to those outside the regime’s participants. This contrasts with infrastructures and social institutions, which often have physical realities or are codified.

Trends in Research on Sustainability Visions

The concept or methodology of Future Design, which this research project addresses, was proposed by economist Tatsuyoshi Saijo in the mid-2010s. This was introduced in a context independent of the aforementioned sustainability transitions research. More specifically, Saijo proposed the working hypothesis that humans have an inherent tendency to derive joy from actions that benefit future generations, and defined Future Design as the practice of designing social mechanisms that elicit such behavior. He also introduced the concept of a "Imaginary Future generation" as a fundamental tool to prompt contemporary individuals to adopt the perspective of future people when designing these social mechanisms (Saijo, 2010).

Since then, Future Design has been adopted by many local governments, private companies, and other organizations as a methodology for creating visions of a desirable sustainable future. The leader of this research project, Nakagawa, has worked to align Future Design with the literature on sustainability visions, aiming to place it within that framework. In the field of sustainability science, the formation of visions has been emphasized, and many studies and practices have accumulated. This is because it is believed that societal transformation is necessary for achieving a sustainable society, and visions that motivate people are considered a driving force for this transformation. In fact, in a review paper on sustainable visions, Wiek and Iwaniec (2014) listed ten criteria that a sustainable vision should meet, one of which is the ninth criterion: that it should be "motivational," meaning that it should inspire people toward transformation. However, it has been noted that there is very little research offering theoretical guidelines on how to form such motivational visions (van der Helm 2009).

The difficulty of forming motivational visions is clear. As Conger (1991) points out in the study of corporate visions, a vision presents a way of seeing things. Therefore, creating one requires deep insight and an artistic sense, making it hard to standardize the process into a manual. To address these difficulties, Nakagawa has positioned Future Design as an approach for creating such visions.

Basic Stance of This Research Project

This research project adopts the stance of re-positioning Future Design (or the concept of the "Virtual Future Person") as an approach for achieving sustainability transitions. By doing so, this project will contribute new perspectives to both the sustainability transitions literature and the Future Design literature. More specifically, this research will adopt the following definition of Future Design, which explicitly includes the term "transition":

The "desirable future" (i.e., the vision) mentioned here refers to the future where of the current regime has been transitioned into another, more sustainable and desirable regime. This approach of defining Future Design allows for the integration of sustainability transitions research with Future Design research (or more broadly, sustainability visions research).

Additionally, adopting this stance opens the path to clarify how the Future Design methodology can contribute to the projects at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN). RIHN's projects, through conducting transdisciplinary research, can be interpreted as ultimately aiming for a societal transition toward a solution for global environmental issues. Whether this interpretation is valid will become clear only by examining whether the concept of "regime" defined above can indeed be applied to each practical project (more specifically, whether each project can be considered to have the ultimate goal of reconfiguring one regime into another).

With this background, the project sets the following two objectives.

Among these, Objective 1 is focused on enhancing the completeness of Future Design as a visioning method. On the other hand, Objective 2 aims to clarify the pathway through which such a visioning method can lead to societal transition. These were the objectives originally set for the project. Meanwhile, the following objective was newly established based on the feedback provided by the EREC in February 2024.

The theory that this project aims to develop is a conceptual framework designed to explain how the Future Design methodology contributes to sustainability transitions. However, the validity of this theory cannot be verified during the project period. In that sense, it is a hypothetical framework. Verifying its validity would likely require several decades, as Future Design seeks to contribute to transitions that occur over such a timescale.

A manual for Future Design practitioners, incorporating the findings from these three objectives, will be published in both Japanese and English. Furthermore, it is expected that the findings will continue to be accumulated by Nakagawa himself or by other researchers after the completion of this strategic project. These outputs will be updated approximately once a year. In this way, the results of this project will be returned to society.

Interviews will be conducted with participants involved in various Future Design practices in Japan, with which Nakagawa is or has been engaged. Through these case studies, insights discovered will be compiled one by one, aiming to clarify how Future Design functions and how these functions were demonstrated in each case. From previous experience, it is understood that the functions of Future Design are diverse. While it may not be possible to comprehensively address all these functions by the end of the project, this is considered inevitable. It is difficult to predict in advance which functions will be demonstrated in each case, as the progress of the research project tends to be less predictable and cannot easily follow a harmonious plan.

The following outcomes are expected:

l  Creation of a list of the functions of Future Design.

l  Accumulation of case studies that demonstrate the existence of each function.

l  Clarification of how each function supports specific parts of the sustainability transition process, with corresponding relationships.

As a general principle, Nakagawa will carry out the tasks independently, but will closely collaborate with other members or other RIHN projects as needed.

Challenges and achievements for this year

Regarding objectives 1 and 2, significant research results had been accumulated during the first and second years of the FR project. The systematic compilation of these results is the outcome of the third year (FR3). These results were published and made available through a Future Design manual for practitioners. However, the first edition, which was released as of January 10, 2025, does not include all of the results. To address this, the second edition is scheduled to be released in March 2025.

On the other hand, all the achievements related to objective 3 were obtained during this year.

As mentioned in Section 3, this project identified five functions that Future Design could potentially exhibit for societal transition. Meanwhile, during the course of the project, as described below, we were able to publish or complete ten papers, including those under peer review. A comparison between the two revealed that for each of the five functions, there is at least one supporting paper (see the figure at the right). Being able to present the project's claims with a certain level of credibility was an outcome that we did not necessarily anticipate at the outset of the project.

In addition to objectives 1-3, responding to all comments received from the EREC in February 2024 was also a goal for this year. However, it is regrettable that the project will be concluded without providing clear answers to several key comments. The comments are as follows.

Until now, I have developed and utilized a method called "Past Design" as training for people to gain the future generation’s perspective for Future Design. This involves looking back at the past from the current perspective and engaging in tasks such as sending request messages and expressing gratitude. This method makes it easier to adopt the perspective of an imaginary future generation and send request messages to people in the present from that viewpoint. This is because Future Design and Past Design are in an analogous relationship. The comment I received this time seems to serve as a wake-up call to this understanding. I believe that it has important implications for the methodology of Future Design. However, at this point, I am unable to clearly state what those implications are. It remains a key challenge to explore moving forward.

I also received the following comment, similar to the one above.

I deeply apologize for not being able to answer this important issue within the duration of this project. To ensure that Future Design can make significant contributions to the sustainability transitions, it is essential to understand how Future Design is accepted by various organizations. Recently, Ms. Fumita from Kijo Town (a former student of Deputy Director Taniguchi) succeeded in incorporating FD into the town's comprehensive planning process. There is no doubt that Ms. Fumita’s efforts played a key role in this success. However, it is equally important to understand how Ms. Fumita interacted with many actors within the organization, including the mayor, in this process. While Nakagawa's project is nearing completion, I would like to explore an answer to this question through an investigation of the Kijo Town case.

In this project, we were unable to provide a sufficient answer to this question. However, Dr. Ichihara from the Kyoto Climate Adaptation Center is conducting research to partially answer this question, with Nakagawa providing support.

Dr. Ichihara has conducted a Future Design workshop to explore climate change adaptation strategies in Kyoto Prefecture, bringing together experts from (1) natural and social sciences, (2) farmers, and (3) local government officials—people with different areas of expertise and perspectives. The impact of the Imaginary Future Generation thought device on the way communication occurred among participants is being analyzed, taking into account follow-up interviews.

In February 2025, thanks to the generosity of Program Director Taniguchi, a seminar will be held inviting the IS and FS projects, where we will have the opportunity to present the results of this project. I believe that we should closely observe to what extent the leaders of IS and FS will evaluate the Future Design method proposed by this project. This will provide insight into how much this project can contribute to RIHN as a member of the Strategic Program.

Future tasks

1. In an organization like RIHN, where researcher turnover is high, the presence of a small number of researchers who have been with the institution for many years has been truly invaluable for this project. I believe that they will continue to hold similar value for the practical projects as well.

2. Active communication between the leaders of each project can ultimately bring significant benefits to both projects. However, each project has its own research plan, and the leaders are busy with its execution, which may lead to a tendency to be cautious about initiating communication with each other. I greatly appreciated the moments when the program directors acted as a bridge between the two. I believe that the presence of the program director will continue to be important moving forward.