>		Naoto Fukasawa
>		Fumiyo Kojima
>		Fumi Masuda
Shunji Yamanaka
Leading Edge Design (+):

		Shunji structured his talk into two portions. In the first part he presented an outline of the various projects he has been involved in during his professional career while in the second part he engaged the participants in a discussion on the subject of robots. Shunji has a very broad understanding of design gained through his numerous engagements in various fields of design. He has worked on the design of the TRI-X and infiniti Q45 cars for the Nissan motor car company and developed the TRI-Z locomotive and its cockpit for Japan Rail East as well as the ticket gates used by JR East. He has designed the kite chair for the Arflex Corporation, and interior furniture for the Saitama Prefecture University and the Future University in Hakodate. In the consumer electronics arena Shunji has designed the O and Ecru Cameras for Olympus, the Asterix watch for Seiko and the 'Insetto' watch for Issey Miyake. He also designed the Tagtype keyboard, a prototype for a keyboard initially designed to help disabled persons use a computer but which can be of use to people using computing devices in non conventional contexts such as lying on the carpet, playing with a PlayStation game-console, etc. In his work Shunji has been primarily concerned with the way people interact with the products he designed, with specific emphasis on the nature of the interaction and how it can be improved upon. Certain objects such as a watch, a car, a chair or a train involve long term interactions, a person would wear a watch most of the day and may spend hours inside a car each day; the design must consider those aspects. However a ticket gate is a barrier whose sole purpose is to check whether a person has a valid train ticket; in this case the level of interaction between the person holding the ticket and the ticket gate should be minimized. In his design of the ticket gate for JR East Shunji reduced the interaction drastically by creating a ticket reader that does not require the ticket holder to insert it into the gate but detects the ticket as it is waved by the user near the gate. This makes passengers pass through the gates more quickly then they would through a conventional ticket gate. Recently Shunji has explored the interactions between humans and robots through the design of the Cyclops and morph3 robots. He reckons that we need to understand how we interact with robots and how we perceive what robots are. We can incorporate facial expression and artificial intelligence into robots, making humans more comfortable with robotic devices which will increasingly move around our living spaces. However we need to understand robots not as mechanized humanoids but as networked devices. A human being is an individual because the body, despite being comprised of several subsystems, is after all a unified entity. Robots are comprised of individual systems which are networked together to form the robot; a robot can extend itself through communication beyond the confines of its humanoid form. A human being for example would need to extend his arm to open a window or press a button to open it if it had a motor attached to it. A robot could simply send a radio signal to the motor to open the window -if the system was so configured. To fully come to grasp with the notion of what robots could be, we need to understand the technology behind them and leave the Hollywood notions of humanoid robots behind. The network nature of robots provided an interesting angle to the Summer Academy focus on remote relations as all interactions between humans and robots and- indeed- between the various components of the robot itself are in a sense remote.