Event Details
Click here to watch the event highlightCircular Design Week (CDW) is a platform that explores the possibility of placed-based circular designs that are enacted in, and emerge out of, the traditions, daily practices, and complex relationalities unique to the Asia-Pacific region. With a strong emphasis on local contexts and learning via firsthand experience, we strive to get a better understanding of the plurality, as well as the autonomous and distributive nature of sustainable societies.
When we talk about circularity, the scales and processes we envision can differ depending on our fields of practice or organizational backgrounds. Finding a common path toward a circular society is never simple.To address this, CDW emphasizes the importance of first coming together in the same place—sharing what we see and feel, and building dialogue through these collective experiences.
CDW in Kyoto and Shiga (November 19-23, 2025) took place over five days, where researchers, designers, and practitioners from Japan and abroad explored circular design practices emerging across the Asia-Pacific region.
We are currently in the midst of transitioning from a modern linear economy —built on mass extraction, mass production, mass consumption, and mass disposal—toward a circular economy that is regenerative both environmentally and economically. However, lifestyles shaped around efficiency and convenience remain deeply ingrained, and turning off the tap of resource use remains a profound challenge. This year at Circular Design Week, we turn our attention to one of the underlying issues: our relationship with time.Modern time is standardized, divided into quarters, weeks, and days. Calendars and clocks regulate much of our thinking and behavior in daily life. The spread of modern clock time has enabled the conversion of qualitative experiences into quantitative measures, driving the translation of almost everything into economic value; yet, in doing so, it has also disconnected us from other modes of time that do not necessarily align with productivity. The pressing question, then, is this: What would happen if we begin to problematize the supremacy and ubiquity of modern clock time?
CDW25 attempts to step back from the dominant framework of modern clock time, experimenting instead with an attunement to the plural temporalities that interweave the post-human fudo—a milieu composed of myriad entities including microorganisms, flora and fauna, landforms, buildings, atmosphere, infrastructures, and machines to name a few. Through such temporal attunements, we aim to explore how we might continue to respond and relate to fudo as infrastructures, and to reimagine circular design as a relational practice grounded in care and maintenance.
For more information, go to CDW 25 Archives DESIAP and RMIT University is a supporter of Circular Design Praxis and CDWEvent Participants
Fumiko Ichikawa (Advisory Board)
Re:Public Inc, (Japan)
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.
Hiroshi Tamura
Re:public Inc (Japan)
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.