E-book "How to Spread Social Design" (3)

<How to Connect Personal Motivation to Social Good>

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Namikawa: Connecting personal motivation with social issues is incredibly important, right? During the "Prayer Tree" project, seeing Nagai-san's approach—where the designer's motivation came from knowing their design would be displayed in Ginza—felt like a very real way of designing.

My approach isn't based on the idea that "people will come if it's for the disaster area." What matters is that personal motivation and social issues overlap – both for me personally and for the team members involved. In that sense, even with the hypocrisy example earlier, if participants feel they're doing it 100% for someone else, it can become about "doing a favor." But if they can participate with about 50% personal motivation, then even if that personal need isn't fully met, it doesn't feel like a betrayal. It can just be about personal fulfillment.

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Nagai: Being able to design that way might be a perspective unique to those working in advertising and communication, where you consider both sender and receiver simultaneously.

Fukushima: Greens' proposal to "make social events personal" is ultimately because people don't see things as their own problems unless they do that. Even with the Olympics, why do we support Japan? Or with Koshien, why do we support the baseball players from our home prefectures? People want to find something that overlaps with themselves, and because they have a desire to support it, whether it's their hobby, their connections with people, or their work, it leads to a sense of duty, which is a different perspective from religion.

I was the one who first suggested the "Prayer Tree," but Nagai-san clearly stated from the start: "If we remove the design perspective, it loses meaning for us and becomes an ambiguous motivation." Even when I insisted, "Let's just raise the money," he replied, "No, that won't work."

We focused on defining what we should do, who we wanted to resonate with, and what our ultimate goal was. Through repeated discussions, our project vision became clearer. During those talks, Mr. Nagai and I constantly pondered, "What exactly is our professional role? What is design?" and we gained many insights. I completely agree with what Mr. Namikawa just said.

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Namikawa: In Japan, the underlying ethics and norms are largely shared. Beyond that, it's left to individual motivation—those who want to do it will, and you don't force it on those who don't. That's the foundational mindset, right? Trying to force ethical actions in that context meets significant resistance in Japan. That's where it differs from the Western approach. I believe the best approach worldwide would be to design systems that respect individual motivation. While everyone shares the underlying desire to improve society, we should build social good initiatives that respect personal motivation. If we can successfully create such systems, that seems like the optimal way forward.

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Nagai: Rather than forcing people to do good, it's about skillfully drawing out what's already within each person's heart and connecting it to positive action. That's precisely where communication and design can make a difference.

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