| Mr. Tanaka |
The content of the entries has changed considerably since passing
the first round of judging. |
| Mr. Ogawa |
I guess this is a result of the competition system where everyone came together
for work sessions. |
| Mr. Watanabe |
In addition to the work sessions, the students also produced blogs together
with the members. Through this process, the members have been able to observe
the students' ideas crystallize. |
| Mr. Ogawa |
It is an interesting way of going about things. |
| Mr. Watanabe |
In this sense, rather than being objective judges, it seems that the members
have become more like supervisors at university. |
| Mr. Tanaka |
Even so, it seems that only about 10% of what we said got through. |
| Mr. Ogawa |
Did you also use presentations like these for the first round of judging? |
| Mr. Watanabe |
No, the first round consisted of judging written entries only. We reviewed
the submitted entries and scored these on-line. |
| Mr. Ogawa |
It is unusual that no women made it through to the second round. Women seem
to have a particular strength in the field of mobile phones. I think they were
quicker to adopt the technology. |
| Mr. Tanaka |
Perhaps they were put off by the choice of 2029 as the year. |
| Mr. Ogawa |
That's probably correct. Women don't place such an importance on the future
and instead their strength lies in proposals that deal directly with what it is
they want. The choice of year was a bit SF oriented. |
| Mr. Takahashi |
Still, the SF aspects of the entries seem to have disappeared. |
| Mr. Barral |
Nor were there any entries from overseas. The content of the entries seems
very parochial. By parochial, I mean oriented towards Japan. There was nothing
about automatic translation, for example. |
| Mr. Tanaka |
Yes, the entries may well be biased towards daily life, particularly daily
life in Japan. |
| Mr. Watanabe |
Instead of using social problems as a starting point, the logic of the entrants
seemed to be based on taking as a starting point the elimination of their own
dissatisfactions, the things that they were not satisfied with, and then generalizing
from there. |
| Ms. Sekine |
The entries appear very much to have been created from things that are close
to the entrants' own lives. Its not so much that they have no social applicability,
rather it is that, being so personally oriented, the entries do not seem to have
taken a broader view to encompass people from different cultures or backgrounds.
They present a very meager image. |
| Mr. Watanabe |
Yes, there was something frustrating about them. |
| Mr. Tanaka |
I had hoped to draw out that aspect of the students ideas, but I wasn't able
to do it very successfully. |
| Mr. Ogawa |
This idea of a "third place", how do the students interpret this? |
| Mr. Maeda |
I think the common meaning is of a place that is part way between the conventional
ideas of public and private. |
| Mr. Ogawa |
It can be thought of as a place that has become a part of the scenery, like
a French cafe, Japanese izakaya or English pub, or simply as a halfway house. |
| Mr. Tanaka |
It seems that there are a growing number of young people whose idea of a third
place is "somewhere where the normal conventions of human interaction are
temporarily suspended" or "somewhere where you can interact with other
people under the guise of a different personality". |
| Mr. Ogawa |
Perhaps you could call that a "fourth place". |
| Ms. Sekine |
That meaning is a little different to what is normally meant by "third
place". |
| Mr. Maeda |
It is like the way those people in Harajuku who dress up in "Gothic and
Lolita" clothing have brought a virtual layer to the physical world that
is separate from ordinary day-to-day life. In the extreme sense of the term, it
could be that a third place is thought of by young people as somewhere you can
do this in a virtual world. |
