About

How we think

Origin of the name

During its years at the Faculty of Global and Science Studies, Yamaguchi University, and the Faculty of Design, Kyushu University, the lab worked as an interdisciplinary design lab that brought HCI and service design together across fields. As the research accumulated, it became clear that the questions originate in the field rather than inside academia, and that answering them requires working with partners outside the university, such as companies, local governments, residents, and cooperatives. To express the move beyond the space between disciplines (inter) toward problem-driven collaboration with partners in industry, government, communities, and the field (trans), the lab took the name Transdisciplinary Design Lab when it moved to Keio University SFC in 2026.

Theoretical lenses

We use two lenses. Service-dominant logic (S-D logic) holds that value is not delivered by firms but co-created by the people who bring their knowledge and skills together, and it gives us a framework for reading the field through the concepts of resources, institutions, and service ecosystems. HCI (human-computer interaction) gives us methods and an accumulated body of knowledge for designing and evaluating the interaction between people and technology. With the former we ask what becomes value and what becomes waste or a barrier, and with the latter we ask how to design the space between people and technology.

Methods

Our methods are human-centred design (HCD) and qualitative research. We capture the institutions of the field (rules, customs, and meanings) through semi-structured interviews and observation, interpret them through reflexive thematic analysis and qualitative content analysis, translate them into personas, journeys, blueprints, and ecosystem maps, and iterate between prototyping and evaluation. When we use generative AI in analysis, we keep an audit trail of independent runs, quotation matching, and line-by-line adjudication by the author.

Subjects

Our subjects range widely, from robots entering care and hospital settings, blockchains entering local communities, and generative AI entering professional work, to infrastructure such as spaceports arriving in rural regions and the redefinition of resources discarded by industries in developing countries. What they share is the view that acceptance and value are decided not by the nature of a technology or material but by institutions (rules, customs, and meanings), and the stance of addressing this through qualitative fieldwork and design intervention.

Director

Name

Satoru Tokuhisa

Position

Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University; member of the Graduate School of Media and Governance (since 1 September 2026)

Career

He received his Ph.D. in Media and Governance from Keio University in 2007. He served as Project Assistant Professor at Keio SFC (2007–2009), Project Lecturer at Keio Media Design (2009–2014), Associate at Takram (2014–2016), Associate Professor at the Faculty of Global and Science Studies, Yamaguchi University (2015–2019), and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Design, Kyushu University (2019–2026), before taking up his current position.

Expertise

His fields are service design, HCI (human-computer interaction), and innovation management. His theoretical foundations are S-D logic, institutional theory, human-centred design, and effectuation.

Accreditation and awards

He is an Accredited Service Design Master of the Service Design Network (2022–2024, the first in Japan) and received the Education 2.0 Outstanding Leadership Award (2023). His work has been accepted at SIGGRAPH, CHI, and TEI and recognized at the Japan Media Arts Festival, among others.

Practice

He co-founded a business producing an alcoholic beverage from coconut juice (2014–2022; shares transferred in 2022) and served as CXO of a financial media service (2013–2019). Since 2019 he has continued to support new-business and service design organizations at large companies.

Links

researchmap ／ ORCID ／ Google Scholar ／ Personal site dangkang.com

Policies

External funding and joint research (under the university’s name)

Competitive grants, foundation grants, and joint research, contract research, and technical guidance with companies and governments are listed from the most recent.

Access

The lab is in room 506 of the ι (iota) building at Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC).
ι506, Shonan Fujisawa Campus, 5322 Endo, Fujisawa, Kanagawa 252-0882, Japan
Take a bus from Shonandai Station (Odakyu Enoshima Line, Sotetsu Izumino Line, or Yokohama Municipal Subway) or from Tsujido Station (JR Tokaido Line). The location of the building is shown on the SFC campus map.