Can Design Help Us Better Understand The Future?

Yosuke Ushigome: The self-styled ‘creative technologist’ and director at design studio Takram on the power of speculative design to make ideas tangible, humanise big data, and encourage healthier behaviours

- Jens H Jensen

I remember first seeing Yosuke Ushigome, now director at Takram’s London office, in 2014 at an exhibition at Tokyo’s 21_21 Design Sight. In a video titled Professional Sharing, Ushigome wears a homemade jacket with solar panels and pockets for various digital devices. He walks around Shibuya, as per requests from real-time clients, and gets paid for taking specific pictures at specific locations. Sometime during the video, he takes an online break while lending his devices’ processing powers to someone mining a digital currency. Later he queues up at a popular restaurant on someone else’s behalf, and likewise gets paid for his time. It was the sharing economy taken to the extreme, and a peek into the not-too-distant future, as he saw it at the time.

Ushigome calls himself a creative technologist. He studied system design engineering and later mechano-informatics in Tokyo before doing a master’s in design interactions at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. ‘I wanted to be better at communicating technological and engineering ideas from a more humanistic perspective,’ he explains. He studied under Critical Design pioneers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, and has been working in design and technology ever since. ‘I believe in the power of design to make ideas tangible – not to make you buy more, but to make you think.’ After graduating from the RCA, he freelanced and worked briefly at design studio Superflux in London before Takram approached him (and fellow RCA alumni Miles Pennington and Lukas Franciszkiewicz) in 2014 to help start its London office.