About

The Chiba Institute of Technology established and hosts the Henkaku Center at its Tsudanuma Campus since November 1, 2021.

The Center will bring together researchers from all sectors of society and both the technical and cultural disciplines to imagine, design, architect, and build technical platforms as well as cultural output to help society through the radical transformation that is happening now.

Background and Significance

As advances in science and technology continue to transform society, we must respond in a coordinated way across all of our sectors - academic, business, government, and civil society.

As the world's systems become increasingly complex, the traditional frameworks for understanding and coordinating change have become inadequate. As a society, we are being confronted with massive cross-sector problems such as responding to climate change, public health emergencies, and digital transformation.

What is required is coordination and the synthesis of legal, technical, economic, and cultural transformation if we are to imagine and respond to both the threats and the opportunities that new science and technology present to the world. We must develop a new language and a new discipline - an anti-discipline - which doesn’t fit in any one discipline and engages in the white space between the disciplines.

We have gotten better at describing our systems and our problems in economic and technical terms. What is both important and missing from much of the current discourse is the lens of philosophy, aesthetics, and culture as the drivers for what we want for our future. In the academy, the liberal arts have been mostly employed to criticize the systems created by technology and economics, but in fact, should help us understand how and more importantly what to design and deploy.