In the afternoon of March the 12th, we visited another beautiful campus of Keio University – Shonan Fujisawa.
www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/en/academics/graduate/
The dean, Hideyuki Tokuda greeted us to the youngest of Keios five campuses, and their first school with a multi- or transdisciplinary orientation.
One of the subjects might be called “Interaction Design 2.0″ with an ambient and user related approach and issue oriented learning methods – PBL – Project based learning, but an extended version which teaches you not only how to solve a problem, but also how to formulate it.
Another important concept that professor Tokuda also has been engaged in from very early on, was “Smart houses”.
After telling the staff from Keio a little about Södertörn, we were given a very vivid lab tour, were both teachers and students gave us a lot of intriguing demonstrations, one more fascinating than the other. This dispite of the fact that our visit took place during the spring brake.
The Tokuda lab, which was designed to be a “smart space” with all objects connected to the network, was a highly effective research area but also meant to give a probable image of the “Future Internet”. There we experienced different ways for the objects to interact with each other and simple ways to start the interaction from a distance, for example by waving your iPhone in different directions.
We also visited the labs of the Professors Michiaki Yasumura and Toshiyuki Masui and got a glimpse of a lot of very interesting concepts, most of them already alive on the web. At Professor Yasumuras lab we experienced several student demonstrations: Locoscape, Nota notaland.com, Social search with shared keyboard, ggtter.com and Pictreco and more. And Professor Matsui gave us several rapid demos of the ubiquitous concept (everything, anytime, everyone, everywhere) including a innovative idea of using our own episodic memory to help us deal with the modern curse of all different passwords we are required to remember.
After a long and most rewarding visit to the Keio university, we left the Shonan Fujisawa campus and returned by bus and train to central Tokyo after our last scheduled visit during our intense journey.
