Postdoctoral Fellow Matthew Mullane Contributes to “The Year 2121: Futures In-Sight,” on View Until May 5th

Tokyo College Postdoctoral Fellow Matthew Mullane has contributed to the exhibition “The Year 2121: Futures In-Sight” currently on view at Tokyo’s 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT exhibition space until May 8^th, 2022. According to the show’s curator Michiaki Matsushima, “the experience of global pandemic has brought drastic and widespread changes to our lifestyle, communication methods and sense of community, as well as to people-values and general ways of thinking. It has brought home to us how unpredictable the future really is.” Matsushima invited a group of designers and thinkers from a wide-ranging set of specialties to help contextualize the uncertainness of the future with interesting texts and objects. The exhibition proposes that design is not just a means of manifesting a future vision, it is also a means to negotiate the very definition of “the future.”

Mullane contributed as a co-editor of the group Habitat Building History (HBH) who presented their work in physical and digital forms in the gallery space. HBH is a collaborative research group and online journal dedicated to understanding the past, present, and future of humans’ architectural relationship with the planet. The group was formed in 2020 by a group of Japan-based architecture historians, architects, artists, and scientists interested in developing a language to describe the ways that humans throughout time have worked within (and beyond) the constraints of the planet’s environment to build “habitats.” Galvanized by the looming threat of climate change, the group believes that interdisciplinary collaboration is vital to developing new habitats that employ both scientific expertise and design innovation in a way that sustains humans and the planet in equal measure. HBH publishes two thematic issues a year that can be viewed on their website.

For more on Habitat Building History, see https://hbh.center/.

For more information on “The Year 2121: Futures In-Sight,” see: http://www.2121designsight.jp/program/2121/