The Research Institute of Science and Technology for Society (RISTEX) has established a new R&D Focus Area for FY2025: “Care-based Social System”. Activities in this new area kicked off in April 2025.
Program Supervisor
NISHIMURA Yumi
Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan UniversityMany issues are argued to be the most pressing facing our present and future society: population decline, aging population, declining birthrate, regional population maldistribution, and increasingly devastating natural disasters. All of these have the potential to fundamentally change and indeed weaken the functions of our communities. In the face of such rapid change, I believe humanity needs to reflect on our past actions and rethink how we engage with others and the natural environment; we need to capability to build a society that can recover and remain viable even when confronted with such crises. When I think about the state of our society, I feel that there is a fundamental lack of “care”: caring for, cherishing, and being considerate of others and our environment.
As of today, we are facing a reality in which keeping the world as we know will be challenging. We must ask ourselves: how can we best make our world sustainable? How can we help it to recover? My view is that it requires us to “be together” with the diversity of life and the global environment; we need this caring attitude in which we are aware of and see value in coexistence and interdependence.
At the same time, caring - which is fundamentally about caring for and valuing others - can at times lead to violence and discrimination. When caring is thought of as something offered from one individual to another, then the recipient may be perceived as weak. It has also been noted that, when it comes to households, the caring tasks - housework, childcare, elderly care - often fall to a certain subset of household members, rather than being shared equally. When intertwined with issues such as discrimination or inequality, the act of caring can symbolize burden. Why does caring engender these sorts of social issues? We need to find innovative ideas and designs that reconsider and reevaluate the phenomena involving “care” noted here, and learn from the bodies, spaces, and environments by whom and where caring takes place, and work towards reclaiming the value of “being together”. This will be the mission of this new R&D Focus Area: the drive for R&D that can cultivate this kind of caring and the development of a care-based society.
Goals
As our society faces accelerating population decline, population aging, and birthrate decline, we are in increasing need of both spontaneous and functional communities in which people can support each other, and social infrastructure which acts in harmony with the surrounding environment. We believe this can be achieved by demonstrating, scientifically, the value of caring - not only in elderly care and childcare, but the value also in housework, watching out for and helping others, education, community building, and local activities - which arise naturally from an awareness of others, oneself, and the external environment. Once demonstrated, this value should then be shared throughout our society, to all communities and living environments. This R&D Focus Area stands at a perspective of inherent interdependence where “humans are weak creatures because they need not only to care for others but also to be cared for by others,” and pursues R&D initiatives designed to embed such caring in communities. The core aim of this Focus Area is to “see across multiple regions examples emerge of spontaneous caring-based social structures, such as the formation of communities in which mutual caring is innate, or the development of living foundations such as infrastructure that allow reciprocal interactions between people and the natural environment.” The projects selected for this R&D Focus Area will need to identify a clear application in a real-world field and verify research outcomes. The projects will aim to demonstrate the potential for a mutually caring community or living foundations including infrastructure that allow reciprocal interactions between people and the natural environment. They will need to demonstrate a dual approach: visualizing and practicing caring.
Overview of R&D Themes
R&D projects under this Focus Area should aim both “visualizing and practicing care and its value”. “Visualizing” does not only imply that projects must focus on analyzing fields where caring takes place to elucidate the nature and value of such caring. Rather, “visualizing” is also intended to incorporate projects which seek to redefine the value of caring in human society and to examine at the ideal nature of caring from historical, social, artistic, cultural, or educational perspectives. It also includes projects focused on constructing concepts of such care-based social systems. “Practicing” should aim to build models through which the identified value of caring can be shared, to roll such models out into real-world scenarios, and to verify and refine them.
- R&D Element (1): Visualizing Care and its Value
The aspects of caring and its associated social value, which are usually overlooked, will be made visible through the implementation of either Element (1)-1 or (1)-2 as set out below.
R&D Element (1)-1: Visualizing Care and its Value through the Analysis of Those Involved in Care
R&D focused on the close observation and analysis of caring activities and their values that are less visible, as well as the individuals involved and the background to their care
R&D Element (1)-2: Visualizing Care and its Value from Historical / Sociological / Artistic / Cultural / Educational or Other Perspectives
R&D focused on the analysis of caring as a “human behavior” from a variety of perspectives, including history, society, art, culture, and education - R&D Element (2): Implementing Social Systems based on the Visualized Value of Care
Based on the outcomes of R&D Element (1), in which we seek to visualize the value of caring, this element entails real-world testing of new directions for and improvements to social systems, based on the notion of human interdependency, as well as verification and refinements (PoC: Proof of Concept). We also intend to engage, through workshops and community dialogues, with the question of what “a care-based society” should look like as suggested by the outcomes of our R&D projects. Through these dialogues we will work towards ensuring that the stakeholders, with community members first and foremost, will eventually take part in our activities voluntarily.
Management Group
Program Supervisor
| NISHIMURA Yumi | Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan University |
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Advisors
| USUI Emiko | Professor, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University |
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| OKADA Michio | Professor, Faculty of Contemporary Social Studies, Chikushi Jogakuen University |
| OKABE Mika | Professor, Graduate School of Human Sciences,The University of Osaka |
| KITA Michihiro | Professor, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Osaka |
| KIMURA Atsunobu | Representative Board Member, Japanese Network of Living Labs / Associate Professor, Tokyo City University / Advisor, Co-Designing Institute for Polyphonic Society |
| KIRIYAMA Shinya | Professor, Faculty of Informatics, Shizuoka University |
| KUMAGAYA Shinichiro | Professor, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo |
| SAKAKIBARA Tetsuya | Professor, School of Arts and Sciences, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University |
| CHIMURA Hiroshi | Director, Daikanyama Yamabiko Clinic |
| NIHEI Misato | Professor, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo |
| HOSOMA Hiromichi | Professor, Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University |
| WAKE Junko | Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan University |
(Listed in Japanese syllabic order)
R&D Projects
FY2025
| Planetary Care for Humans and Nonhumans NAKAJIMA Takeshi (Professor / Associate Dean, Institute for Liberal Arts, Institute of Science Tokyo) |
2025.10ｰ2030.3 |
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| Reflective Care Support Program Grounded in Mutual Expectations NAKATANI Momoko (Professor, School of Engineering, Institute of Science Tokyo) |
2025.10ｰ2030.3 |
| Innovating and Reconstructing Dialog Practices with Care in Science–Technology–Society Interfaces YAGI Ekou (Professor, Center for the Study of Co*Design, The University of Osaka) |
2025.10ｰ2030.3 |
