Kazuo Tase (President and CEO of SDG Partners, Inc.), who is a leading person of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Japan, and Miho Konishi (director of IALD—the navigator of this fair—and a lighting designer) had a panel discussion about the future of lighting based on SDGs.

Tase began with an introduction to the background of the SDGs and how businesses can utilize them. The SDGs were developed and adopted by all 193 UN members on September 25, 2015. Tase said these are a miraculous blueprint of a society that we hope to pass down to the next generation in 2030. The SDGs are not legally binding, yet business people and top leaders worldwide are now trying to reconstruct business itself based on the SDGs.
In Japan, we hear the term “innovation” every day. However, it’s said that most of these innovations are something similar to symptomatic treatments. For instance, when you get tired, you drink an energy drink and return to work. Such inductive innovations themselves don’t solve problems. Deductive innovations, often called design thinking, are the opposite. When developing a new product or setting a goal for a company in 2050, for example, various companies are trying to combine inductive systems thinking with design thinking based on SDGs, and a “temporal back-calculation” to articulate the necessary schedule and a “logical back-calculation” that takes into account the ideal goals of human beings.

Next, Konishi spoke about how she would think about SDGs and lighting design while taking into account her personal opinions. Konishi said the exploration of sustainable lighting has five values. The first one is “emotion,” followed by “beauty,” “health,” “function,” and “ecology” at the end. They consider that these five values are closely related to the commitment of the SDGs. These values directly lead to lighting plans that improve physical and mental health, autonomic nerves, and hormone balance—in other words, human-centric lighting and circadian rhythms. In terms of future lighting, Konishi thinks it will be something to control health, and to remind us of (or to discover) the importance of our feelings. Furthermore, by confronting SDGs as a lighting designer, she feels a strong urge to enlighten people about how individuals face lighting since lighting control at the personal level (such as in individual houses) is becoming common.

In the end, Tase concluded that thinking about lighting used in 2030, and lighting controls and lighting options that we should provide the next generation may become an essential job.

【Date & Time】14:15‒15:15, March 6, 2019
【Venue】Room 102, 1F, Conference Tower, Tokyo Big Sight
【Speaker】Kazuo Tase, President & CEO, SDG Partners, Inc.
【Moderator】Miho Konishi, Director, ALG (Architectural Lighting Group)
【Organizers】IALD Japan, JLMA, Nikkei Inc.

Profile

Kazuo Tase

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (1992-2005), United Nations (2005-2014), Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting (2014-2017), then founded SDG Partners, Inc. in 2017.

Miho Konishi

Graduating Household Economy Department of Japan Women’s University: AA school in London (AA.Int/ARB/RIBA1). Working for, Foster + Partners, London as Architectural Assistant. ALG as director in Lighting since 2007. 2008 Fujiya Inn “Award of Excellence” from IALD. 2012 Tokyo American Club “Lighting Design Prize” from Japan Illumination Society.