2023 Play City Mini Kawasaki, the community initiative Eriko has been leading since its debut in 2018, was successfully done.

The students in elementary schools and junior high schools, around fifty in total, had been discussing how to establish and operate their own city Mini Kawasaki every other week.
Their real city emerged on October 8th in Tachibana Park, a city park in Kawasaki. Due to rain and wind the original plan of two-day event was reduced to one day, but more than three hundred kids visited the Play City.
Please take a look at Play City Mini Kawasaki site to learn more about their activities and achievements.

Infield design has been sponsoring this initiative through financial and service support. This year Yui has been supporting the program coordination and management, and along the way she has been doing her own research exploring motivation and personal growth of six young volunteers who facilitated 50+ kids throughout the city-planning and development process.

What drove those six volunteers throughout the project? What are their expectations, learnings, changes, and reflections? From the July kickoff until the actual event in October, Yui tapped in the time-tested tools of UX design, such as photo diary and in-depth interviews to explore those questions.

Young Japanese are typically seen as less interested in community activities than their counterparts in North America and Europe. But the recent emphasis on exploratory learning in Japanese educational system might have caused gradual change among them. Also the COVID has a strong impact on this generation, who were forced to spent most of their college life online, at home.

Yui is now adding the finishing touches on her report, and will host a presentation in coming December. Please contact us if you are interested!