About TZU DESIS Lab.

DESIS is an acronym for Design for Social Innovation towards Sustainability. It is a global network connecting design universities around the world, initiated in 2009 by Ezio Manzini (Professor Emeritus at Politecnico di Milano).

TZU DESIS Lab. was the first DESIS Lab established in Japan. It was founded in 2011 at Tokyo Zokei University under the leadership of Professor Fumikazu Masuda (then Professor of the Sustainable Project and Industrial Design Program). Tokyo Zokei University upholds the founding principle of “the exploration and practice of creative activities that shape society.” Within this framework, TZU DESIS Lab. reinterprets the role of art and design as creative practices for building a sustainable society, and engages in both research and practice toward that goal.

Located in a forested satoyama environment, Tokyo Zokei University is a uniquely situated art and design institution in Japan. The lab regards the university’s forest as a living experimental field for exploring and envisioning sustainable societies and lifestyles. Through this setting, students, faculty, and local community members come together to collaborate on experimental projects.

Contemporary society is facing a “ecological rift.”

Human beings extract resources from nature through labor and science and technology, and by processing those resources, we produce houses, clothing, food, energy, and many other things necessary for everyday life. We sustain our daily lives through the consumption of these products.

At the same time, however, we continue to discharge large amounts of waste, such as garbage and greenhouse gases, into nature as an externalized space.

By placing excessive burdens on nature, emitting waste beyond what ecosystems can absorb, and continuously releasing substances that nature cannot decompose or assimilate, we have created environmental problems such as marine plastic pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change.

Today, we are already experiencing the consequences of these problems in various forms, including extreme weather events, natural disasters, and ecological changes. Moreover, under a consumer society, production and consumption continue to expand, deepening the rift between human society and nature.

Under consumer society, large-scale circulation of resources becomes an opportunity for further economic growth

In recent years, circular design has attracted attention as a way to address what is often called the “metabolic rift” between human society and nature.

Circular design seeks to minimize waste and continuously circulate resources in order to sustain economic activity while reducing ecological impacts. Underlying this approach is the idea of “decoupling” — the belief that economic growth can be separated from environmental degradation.

Certainly, if waste is not simply sent to landfills or incinerators but instead reused as a resource, it can reduce both waste generation and the extraction of new raw materials, thereby lowering environmental burdens.

However, what must not be overlooked is that economic growth itself continually generates new demand for resources. As economies expand, production and consumption also increase, requiring ever greater amounts of materials and energy.

Of course, global population growth is one factor behind this trend. Yet an even more significant factor is the expansion of lifestyles based on mass production and mass consumption, particularly in high-income countries such as Japan, Europe, and the United States. Today, these lifestyles are increasingly spreading to the Global South as well.

This way of life has been described as an “imperial mode of living.” It refers to the ordinary lifestyles of affluent societies that maintain comfort and prosperity by relying on resources and labor extracted from other regions, while placing heavy burdens not only on people but also on animals and ecosystems.

Equally important is the fact that improvements in resource efficiency through science and technology do not necessarily reduce overall resource consumption. In many cases, greater efficiency actually expands production and consumption, ultimately increasing total resource use. This phenomenon is known as the “Jevons paradox.”

In other words, within a consumer society, technological innovation is often used not to reduce production, but to further expand it and sustain the imperial mode of living. As a result, even efforts such as dematerialization through service economies or the development of new eco-friendly materials are often offset by the increased resource demand generated by continued economic growth.

Consequently, there are clear limits to what resource circulation alone can achieve. Circular systems can only compensate for a portion of the ever-growing demand for resources.

Even if large-scale systems of resource circulation are developed faster than the growth in resource demand, the effectiveness of resource circulation still has its limits

Maintaining the quality of resources while continuously circulating them also requires large amounts of energy and cost. Moreover, no matter how often resources are recycled, they gradually deteriorate through processes of use and transformation. This is closely related to the law of increasing entropy, meaning that resources inevitably become waste over time.

In addition, it is practically impossible to create a perfectly closed-loop circulation system. New resource inputs are always required somewhere in the process. As a result, even if large-scale systems of resource circulation are established, continued economic growth will still increase overall resource demand, leading to further extraction of natural resources and greater ecological pressure.

In other words, within a consumer society that assumes continuous economic growth as its foundation, circular design risks functioning not as a fundamental transformation of the economy, but rather as a new field for further economic expansion. Consequently, it may increase resource demand even further, limiting the environmental benefits that circular systems are expected to provide and making it difficult to prevent ecological collapse.

Looking ahead, demand for food and energy resources is expected to continue increasing due to both global population growth and the expansion of the imperial mode of living. Under such conditions, resource circulation alone cannot solve global environmental problems. In other words, simply “greening” capitalist production — that is, systems of mass production and mass consumption driven by profit and capital accumulation — through eco-design or circular design is insufficient.

Furthermore, the Japanese author Shu Yamaguchi points out that if the global economy were to continue growing at an annual rate of 4%, the size of the economy would become approximately 49 times larger in 100 years, around 129,000 times larger in 300 years, and roughly 10 quadrillion 3,826 trillion times larger in 1,000 years.

Of course, this is a simple calculation based on compound growth. Nevertheless, it illustrates how unrealistic the assumption of infinite economic growth truly is. The belief that technological innovation can solve environmental problems, overcome the “limits to growth,” and allow the economy to expand indefinitely is, in reality, extremely difficult to sustain.

From the Greening of Capitalist Production to the Design of a New Sustainable Society Based on Regionalist Production

Systems of production that seek to expand profit and economic growth by commodifying not only material goods and human relationships, but even the natural environment itself, have deeply penetrated local communities throughout the world. As a result, local communities and the reproduction of everyday life have increasingly been absorbed into the market, while communities that were once sustained through mutual aid and reciprocal relationships — and that possessed a certain degree of autonomy — have gradually weakened across the globe.

As the foundations of human survival and the reproduction of daily life became dependent not on local communities or local ecosystems, but on unstable markets, individuals gained the “freedom of choice” within the marketplace. At the same time, however, they were forced to bear personal responsibility for sustaining their own lives, leading to a wide range of social and psychological problems. These include the collapse of local communities, inequality and poverty, abuse, lonely deaths, suicide, mental illness, and anxiety over unemployment.

Particularly since the rise of neoliberalism, the marketization of local communities and everyday life has accelerated even further, and people’s lives have become more deeply embedded within market logic.

Moreover, as these systems of production penetrated local societies, people gradually lost their connection to place and their sense of rootedness. As it became normal to choose where to live based on convenience — proximity to workplaces or schools, housing prices, or rental availability — communities increasingly turned into places that function merely as “machines for living.”

Although laws and institutional systems remained, opportunities to cultivate shared customs, cultures, and values diminished, and residents became increasingly indifferent to one another.

At the same time, people came to leave the organization of their lives to governments and corporations, abandoning local self-governance and autonomy. The result has been the spread of a self-centered individualism that neglects the commons — shared forms of wealth such as natural environments and social justice. It became taken for granted that the necessities for reproducing daily life could simply be purchased from the market whenever needed, as long as one had sufficient income.

In this sense, capitalist production has spread values and lifestyles throughout the world that prioritize individual freedom while neglecting the commons. While it has brought individuals a certain degree of freedom, it has also produced instability and social fragmentation.

In contrast, regionalist production represents an ecosocialist attempt to create more self-reliant forms of living by enabling people within a region to cooperate in protecting nature and utilizing locally renewable resources. It seeks to relocate the foundations of life within the lived reality of place and community, thereby fostering a renewed sense of belonging and rootedness. In this way, it may provide an opportunity to recover forms of rootedness and commons that capitalist production has eroded.

Certainly, a way of life based on regionalist production — one that abandons the imperial mode of living and the systems of production that sustain it — may involve certain inconveniences compared to contemporary consumer society. Yet it also holds the possibility of creating lives that are more stable psychologically, economically, socially, ecologically, metabolically, and climatically.

The systems of production that sustain the imperial mode of living generate violence against both nature and life itself through resource extraction, environmental destruction, and the exploitation of workers and animals in the Global South. Because the reproduction of our everyday lives has become structurally embedded within these systems, we are compelled — whether consciously or not — to participate in this violence.

Regionalist production, therefore, offers a possible means of escaping this form of structural violence: violence that does not originate from a single identifiable individual or group, but from the organization of society itself.

Exploration and practice of creative design activities for building a sustainable society

TZU DESIS Lab. believes that the mission of design is to envision and implement entirely new forms of society and civilization as alternatives to today’s unsustainable world. To this end, the lab explores and designs sustainable societies and lifestyles grounded in localized production through the exploration and practice of creative formative activities.

The forest (satoyama) surrounding Tokyo Zokei University was once a commons that supported the reproduction of local livelihoods. The broader area, including the university, is said to have been a site of production for Sue ware pottery, as well as iron tools such as farming implements and weapons, wooden utensils like plates and bowls, and even horse breeding. By the end of the Heian period and into the Kamakura period, however, the influx of domestically produced ceramics and imported porcelain from China led to a decline in Sue ware production. From the Kamakura period through to the modern era, the deciduous broadleaf forests around the university continued to be used modestly as satoyama by local farmers.

For example, until gas and electricity became widespread, farmers gathered firewood from these forests as a primary energy source. The ash produced from firewood—rich in alkaline calcium, potassium, and other minerals—was used as fertilizer, while fallen leaves from broadleaf trees were used to enrich the soil. Farmers also cultivated mulberry trees for sericulture as a side occupation, and grew bamboo grass for making baskets during the agricultural off-season.

With the advance of modernization, however, the use of satoyama declined. Firewood was no longer needed as an energy source, goods came to be purchased rather than made, and the use of bamboo, mulberry, and timber disappeared. As agriculture declined, or shifted toward purchased fertilizers, the use of ash and fallen leaves also faded. As a result, the cyclical use of satoyama resources was disrupted, and the forests were gradually abandoned and degraded.

At TZU DESIS Lab., we enter these neglected university forests together with students, faculty, and local residents, caring for and regenerating the forest and soil in order to restore degraded ecosystems to a healthy state. Drawing on nature’s gifts, we design useful elements for everyday life, build ecosystems that foster local circulation in collaboration with communities, and create new artifacts from these circulating resources. Starting from the values already embedded in the forest, we seek to reclaim autonomy in everyday life and to explore and propose new forms of sustainable society and lifestyles based on localized production.

Furthermore, rather than following the path of “ecological modernization”—which attempts to resolve environmental problems and the contradictions of consumer society through technological and systemic innovation in order to sustain capitalist production—we pursue more radical forms of social innovation and alternative visions of society. In doing so, we also collaborate with regions such as Thailand and Indonesia, where localized production practices are more advanced, to collectively envision new sustainable futures.

Our Projects

Wild Thoughth Project

This project draws on the concept of bricolage—proposed by the social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his book La Pensée sauvage (The wild thought)—which refers to making do with what is at hand, assembling and creating with available materials and tools. Using this idea as a starting point, the project practices design and art that engage with and draw from nature.

Participants enter the university forest and, in collaboration with local community members, work to care for and regenerate the satoyama landscape. Through activities such as creating and expressing with materials discovered on site, the project aims to cultivate what Lévi-Strauss called “wild thought.”

Hachioji Traditional Washi Paper Project

Paper has long been used not only as a surface for writing, but also as a shared material across a wide range of design and artistic practices—including tools for everyday life, clothing, architecture, furniture, and art. Traditionally, much paper was made from locally available natural materials such as bamboo, kōzo (paper mulberry), and mulberry. However, as Western paper made from imported wood pulp came to be mass-produced in factories, these familiar natural materials gradually fell out of use. This project is based on the core concept of “making paper from materials found in our immediate surroundings.” It explores design and artistic expression that draw on natural materials available locally and within everyday environments.

Spedagi Tokyo Project

Sustainable and renewable, bamboo has long been used around the world in many aspects of everyday life—including clothing, food, housing, writing and record-keeping, paper, musical instruments, fishing tools, toys, furniture, and household items. However, as bamboo has been replaced by plastic materials, it has fallen out of use. As a result, bamboo groves in many regions have been neglected, leading to overgrowth and ecological problems.

In this project, we work to restore and manage the university’s bamboo groves—through activities such as cutting old bamboo, pruning branches, thinning stands, composting bamboo, clearing undergrowth, and marking—while exploring design practices that make use of the harvested bamboo.