This year's workshop will be focusing on women in Nagoya and their growing influence on the city's lifestyle. The workshop will be conducted by the creative team behind the award-winning project MadeiMTL: Producer Nicolas Fonseca, creative director Mouna Andraos and documentary Director Ziad Touma.

The workshops goal is to explore gender-specific design with a social impact, through a new-media documentary approach. By the end of the workshop, after a process of documenting women-driven lifestyle trends, students will make an innovative proposition that will cater to the new social reality brought forth by the demographic changes in Nagoya.

In terms of work and marriage, it is often said that Japanese women have a unique perspective about their identity, which women in other developed countries do not have. We will do an exploration of how the lifestyles and values of Japanese women affect social trends in this country. In particular, in the last 5 years, in Japan as well as many parts of Asian countries (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore), we are facing an unprecedented social phenomenon of women staying single by the drove, a rapidly declining birthrate and an increasingly aging population.

This social phenomenon has become great cause for concern for both policy makers as well as industries/academic institutions in these countries. In a world where women and family are becoming more diversified, traditional values towards home, family and work are now collapsing. We feel that this collapse demands that we seriously consider new perspectives on how we can use design to develop new visions and scenarios on how we want to live.

We will explore the city of Nagoya by conducting field research about the relationship between design and gender. Throughout the week, in teams of four, students will use video, photography, sound and text to go beyond the surface of new lifestyle trends. Each day, they will publish their findings in order to communicate what they see, feel, hear and think about social changes in both small and large scales, from the general to the specific and vice-versa. They will determine problematics related to gender issues and come up with propositions of how we can use design to improve everyday life.

On February 10, 2006, the workshop participants will make presentations about their findings at a symposium attended by around 80 persons including professional designers, educators, company managers, design students and reporters from Japanese media.