To promote our role as a platform for collaborative creation among industry, government, academia and citizens that integrates university knowledge related to the future society, we have implemented the following projects.
1. Webinar series of COVID-19 and the Future
Due to the spread of COVID-19 on a global scale, we are urgently required to undergo major changes in our daily lives and establish new lifestyles and new social and economic patterns that are different from those of the past. In other words, we should not merely revert to a Pre-Corona state, but rather, we should continue to live Intra-Corona, living with the virus and doing socio-economic activities. In the midst of all this, we are looking ahead to the Post-Corona era and invite experts in various fields to discuss a more sustainable future society.
2. Interviews about “Future Exploration 2050”
What impact will today’s academic research have on the future society as society changes dramatically due to globalization and rapid progress in science and technology? The book “Future Exploration 2050 (Mirai Tankyu 2050)” edited by IFI has been published in March 2021, which presents various methodologies for approaching the future and discusses the necessity of considering the future society through interviews with 30 professors from various fields.
For this special web interview, we conducted interviews with faculty members of the University of Tokyo prior to the book’s publication, in the same format as the interviews introduced in the book. We asked them to describe their vision of the future in 2050 from their professional standpoints.