Living Lens: An Introduction to Urban Design with Living Creatures

Welcoming the Excluded into the City

Cities have been designed for humans. But from what perspective do the creatures living quietly within the city view this space?

There is a term called the “exclusion bench .” These are benches intentionally designed with handrails or altered shapes to prevent homeless people from lying down. Created as a direct response to the client’s needs, this product sharply raises the question of what design excludes and what it includes.This program begins by directing that question toward “living creatures.”

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From whose perspective does technology emerge?

If we continue to think about technology solely from a human perspective, a certain blind spot emerges. What do we consider a problem, and what do we call a solution? That very framework for judgment is, without our realizing it, defined by Western modern rationalism and capitalist logic.Efficiency, optimization, management. When these terms function as self-evident truths, it becomes difficult to notice what falls through the cracks.

Could we “install” the perspective of living beings? In *The Companion Species Manifesto*, Donna Haraway argued that humans and non-humans construct the world while relating to one another as equal “significant others.” By incorporating this perspective into urban design, living beings—who have until now been subjects of control and exclusion—emerge as agents who co-create space.

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The Perspective of Living Beings as Part of Our Everyday Lives

This four-part program, launched in collaboration with Nippon Steel & Sumikin Real Estate and Taisei Corporation, was designed as a forum to reexamine these premises.

What is crucial is not to view biodiversity as a distant technical challenge.While issues such as the management of planted forests and the degradation of rocky shores are certainly serious, they lie beyond the scale that individuals or designers can influence. This program aims for something prior to that: changing our own perceptions. We want to engage with living creatures not as third-person objects of management, but through a second-person relationship.

Fieldwork is the method for achieving this. By using our own eyes and bodies to observe how living things live within the city, our very perspective on the city changes. This is not a matter of adding new knowledge, but rather an experience that rewrites the very circuits through which we see. We would like to reexamine the “modern” view of technology that we have unconsciously adopted, alongside living things.

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Session List

Part 1

March 5, 2025
: Rintaro Nakajo (CEO and Representative Director, LearnWiz, Inc.; Researcher), Masahisa Okabe (Representative, Kuro Mats Project; Landscape Architect; Garden Designer), Hiroki Taga (Director and COO, Biome Co., Ltd.), Yuki Igeta (Project Researcher, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo)

Input Talk: Understanding the Reality of Living Organisms and the Environment Through Data
Fieldwork: Walking the Site from the Perspective of Living Organisms to Find Clues
Main Workshop: Designing Spaces Where Diverse “Selves”—Including Humans—Interact
Feedback Session

Part 2

KICKOFF Talk (September 11, 2025)
Yusato Okuda (Co-Representative, Poietica LLC)
Field Research / Collecting Data | Exploring and Researching the Site’s Context (September 28, 2025) Kosuke
Katano (Landscape Unit veig), Hiroki Taga (Biome Co., Ltd.)
Collecting Data / Quick Prototyping | Gathering Data and New Insights to Rapidly Validate Ideas (October 9, 2025) Rintaro
Nakajo (Researcher)
Advancement | Developing the insights gained and translating them into concrete designs (October 22, 2025)

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