Fumiko Ichikawa has received her Masters degree in Human Computer Interaction from Keio University. In her commercial career, she has worked with many leading companies and design offices, where she took lead in global design research based in Finland, China, and Japan. After the financial crisis and the great earthquake that took place in Northern Japan in 2011, Fumiko co-founded a company Re:public, Inc together with Hiroshi, Tamura. Together with national and regional governments, companies of all sizes, and educational institutes, her mission is to empower individuals and develop innovation platforms for the better future. Fumiko is a member of Reach, the global design research network, and a founding director of Innovators 100, an innovation program commissioned by Hiroshima prefecture. She also organizes a Serial Innovators consortium, an alliance where she studies how innovators create and deliver breakthrough innovations.

Re:public Inc., is not a design firm nor a research agency, but a Think & Do tank specialized in architecting innovation ecosystems in an organization, a society, or a nation. When problems are becoming increasingly complex beyond the control of a single entity, we take a systemic, human-centered approach to understand the issues and build innovation capacity to act. A team led by Hiroshi is engaged in developing a “Citizen-led Innovation” platform in Fukuoka (a city of over a million inhabitants in the southern island of Japan) where citizens are taking an active role by shaping trans-boundary innovation teams with national and regional business enterprises. He will show the early initiatives from this ecosystem.

Hiroshi also serves as Co-Founder and Executive Fellow at i.school at The University of Tokyo where he teaches students to foster skills and mindsets to realize innovation through design-driven processes and harness ethnographic investigation. Since the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, Hiroshi has been working to revitalize Kesennuma, a town severely destroyed, co-working with local fishermen, factory owners and high school students to envision futures and take the initial steps towards it. Hiroshi leads  “Citizen-led Innovation” platform in Fukuoka City where citizen participation takes a key role for change.

Joyce Yee is Professor of Design and Social Innovation at Northumbria School of Design, UK. Joyce’s research explores how design is used to support, enable and drive change through the creation of innovative practices in organisations. She co-founded the Designing Social Innovation in Asia-Pacific network (www.desiap.org) in 2015 with Dr Yoko Akama, RMIT in Australia, as a peer learning network for social innovation practitioners using design. She is passionate about design for social good and advocates for culturally diverse and locally relevant practices that challenge the dominant industrialized and western-centric models of design.

Kimmi Ha (Ha Phan Kim Nguyet) is a designer, researcher, and social entrepreneur based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She founded UPGREEN Vietnam, a circular design studio that turns low-value plastic waste into cultural objects finished with traditional Vietnamese lacquer (sơn mài). Her practice treats craft as a form of knowledge: the slow cycles of layering, curing, and sanding become a way to rethink what counts as waste and what counts as value. She is a PhD candidate at RMIT University and teaches design at several universities in Vietnam. In 2026, she was part of the organizing team for Circular Design Week in the Mekong Delta, where she co-developed the Cảm Ứng fieldwork methodology grounded in Vietnamese language and cultural epistemology. Kim is interested in how design, craft heritage, and community knowledge can support regenerative futures in Southeast Asia. She is a YSEALI Professional Fellow and a 2026 Seoul Design Award finalist.

Nicola St John is a settler Australian co-designer, design historian, and lecturer at RMIT University. Her practice is concerned with the promotion of respectful, responsible, and relational ways of designing. Her multi-award winning co-design work has led to the development of Australia’s only First Nations-led illustration agency – Solid Lines, a national podcast series around respectful collaboration, and strategies for design industries to incorporate diverse knowledges and infrastructures within commercial practice. Her design history and education practice focuses on reimaging Australian design away from settler narratives, towards acknowledging rich and diverse histories and knowledges.

Thuy-Tien Vo is an artist-curator, practice-led researcher, and Associate Lecturer in the School of Communication & Design, RMIT Vietnam. Her practice explores how ritual, rehearsal and everyday forms are collectively performed, inherited and remade. She co-founded Ba Rọi Collective and [[Rehearsal]], whose devised performances and micro-cinemas unfold in homes, makeshift venues and art spaces across Vietnam, China, Thailand and the United States. Her inter-Asian collaborations extend to Indonesia and Japan. Most recently, she curated Circular Design Week 2026 with partners in the Mekong Delta (Cần Thơ and Trà Vinh): Abavina, a cooperative for circular, low-emission farming; Sokfarm, an organic coconut-nectar producer sustaining a Khmer craft of tending coconut blossoms; and Ánh Dương Center, which supports marginalised rural communities. DESIAP was research partner.

Yoko Akama is a design researcher and educator in the School of Design, RMIT University, by Naarm, Kulin Nation (also called Melbourne, Australia). She is a recipient of several national and international awards and research funding for collaborative work with self-determining Indigenous nations and regional communities preparing for disaster. Her practice explores ways to enhance qualities of inter-relating through differences and plurality. While she has lived, studied and worked in the UK, US and Australia, her Japanese heritage and ongoing work with collaborators in and from Asia continues to shape her practice. She brings this practice to research, teaching and various platform leadership through participatory collaboration to address various entrenched issues and explore shared human and more-than-human futures.