About.

Chikayuki Ogino began researching information in 2000. Travelling through twelve countries, he investigated information in different countries and societies and laid the foundations for his research. He approaches information as a phenomenon, examining its properties, structures, relationships and effects across disciplines. Across countries, even as the names given to subjects and the values attached to them change, he has cultivated the idea of treating them all as information.

He completed a paper drawing on insights from cognitive science, psychology, philosophy and fluid mechanics, bringing together his early thinking on how to understand and describe information.

His work in information development and implementation in society first focused on the spaces of homes and facilities. He analyses the structures and interrelationships of people, environments, functions and materials as information, including how they change over long timescales. He gives these structures and relationships concrete form as systems that function in everyday living spaces and facilities. ORGANIC WHOLE, one such project, received a GOOD DESIGN AWARD.

He has extended this work to the relationships between space and information in cities and large facilities. In settings where diverse people, activities and functions intersect, he researches and develops ways to configure information and establish relationships among people, facilities and their surrounding communities. His information development work includes MAZDA Zoom-Zoom Stadium Hiroshima, Nagano Prefectural Budokan and Bandai City in Niigata, as well as public sports halls and libraries, kindergartens and universities, and cultural and commercial facilities.

He collaborates with organisations, groups and local authorities to research and develop information that connects their activities with society. He has worked on projects involving Tokyo Skytree, Metropolitan Expressway Co., Ltd., Mitsubishi Pencil Co., Ltd., industry–academia–government collaboration initiatives at Waseda University, and the City of Sayama in Saitama Prefecture. He researches the characteristics of those undertaking these activities and their relationships with society from the perspective of how information is configured, and carries out development on that basis.

His research into companies and brands analyses how they exist within society as information, including variations in scale and timescale. His research and development addresses interconnected forms of information: information that conveys their activities and value, mechanisms that support growth, and information embodied in physical forms, including products. In response to the environment, demand and circumstances, he builds on existing systems to configure relationships among the presentation of meaning and value, form and conditions of use. He gives these relationships concrete form and implements them. These projects include TAIKEIDO YAKUHO, which received a GOOD DESIGN AWARD, and Dr. Nano Mini, which received an iF DESIGN AWARD.

In technology, he treats technologies themselves as information, analysing their inherent properties and functions and researching their relationships with the conditions under which people understand, assess and use them. His work includes projects in food-processing, water-quality improvement and photovoltaic technologies. Through this work, he researches and develops ways for technology, as information, to function in society and contribute to a better society. SQPV GLASS received a GOOD DESIGN AWARD.

He also conducts research in which he sets his own research problems and develops specific content and conditions for implementation in society. He gives research models concrete form and tests how they function in society. ANDBOX emerged from his research into the grouping of information. Through collaborative development, its underlying concept was realised as a physical structure. ANDBOX received a GOOD DESIGN AWARD.

He also works with companies and organisations on the long-term, ongoing management, operation and development of information. At the Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, the University of Tokyo, he researches and develops information configurations across the organisation and its facilities, as well as mechanisms for sharing and collaboration within and beyond the institute, and continues to work on their day-to-day operation and updating. Working with partner companies and practitioners in agriculture, real estate and construction, he continues this research and development. His work spans the formation of information and the activities and changes that follow.

Drawing on more than a quarter-century of inquiry, he works towards a common language system through which information can be described and analysed across disciplinary boundaries, and modelled, compared and planned. He represents the configurations and changes of subjects in models grounded in description and analysis, connecting insights from observation and comparison to information development for specific purposes, implementation in society, and subsequent operation and updating. Throughout, his subject of research is information. Through this research, he raises questions for society and aims to improve the fit of information environments to support the possibilities for information to take shape, be put to use, be updated and evolve.