#DesignIndaba2020: Kinya Tagawa "to plot for the future" as speaker

2 Dec 2019

Kinya Tagawa, a Japanese award-winning design engineer who runs international design agency Takram, with studios in Tokyo and London, has been selected as one of the speakers for next year's Design Indaba Conference.

Image source: Royal College of Art.

Tagawa holds a BEng from the University of Tokyo and an MA from the Royal College of Art in the UK. His work has been selected for the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was a Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art from 2015 to 2018, and was made an Honorary Fellow there in 2018. In addition, he is also a member of several design-related committees of the Japanese Government.

Featuring a multilateral development approach that capitalises on both design and engineering perspectives, Tagawa is active in a wide range of products from interactive artworks to software and hardware.

Engineering and design extraordinaire Kinya Tagawa of Takram design studio is bringing his design ingenuity to Design Indaba 2020.
Tagawa believes in threading humanity into technology and using it to design for the future. #25YearsofDesignIndaba https://t.co/AcLeX4uknD pic.twitter.com/HZ01ETwp5I
— Design Indaba (@designindaba) November 22, 2019

Takram was founded in 2006 by Kinya Tagawa and Motohide Hatanaka, and has made a name for itself at the futuristic border of high-tech design and installation art. Its very name means 'to plot for the future' in Japanese.

The firm has won several major awards including the Microsoft Innovation Award Grand Prize (2007) and red dot award: product design (2009). Recently he has been assigned as a member of the juries of D&AD Design Award, Japan Good Design Award and the James Dyson Design Award.

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During a forum on 'The Future of the Factory in Japan' at Panasonic's Cross-Value Innovation Forum (2018), Tagawa gave his opinion on finding the right talent in order to stay competitive and he highlighted the need for organisations to encourage different teams to collaborate. He believes that "innovation requires cross-pollination" and said, "I have seen cases where marketing teams are regularly meeting up with their fellow research colleagues. We need more of that to enable innovation to thrive".

Tagawa will be speaking at the 25th Design Indaba Conference, that will run from 26 to 28 February 2020 at the Artscape Theatre Centre in Cape Town.

Ticket sales for the Design Indaba 2020 are officially open. Tickets can be bought on Webtickets, and for the latest updates and news, you can follow our Design Indaba special section.

For more:
www.designindaba.com