Disaster Preparedness Design That Begins with Questions

No.8( Commission )

#Creative Direction#Research and Development#Future Design

2026

Disaster Preparedness Design That Begins with Questions

What If? BOSAI: The Next Disaster｜21_21 DESIGN SIGHT

WOW directed the exhibition “What If? BOSAI: The Next Disaster,” held at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT in 2025, as a whole and produced “What if? – Answers from everyone,” a participatory video installation for visitors. The exhibition brought together a wide range of perspectives on disaster preparedness, from the latest simulation technologies and product design to age-old orally conveyed traditions. WOW’s goal was to pose questions that would lead visitors to see disaster, an extraordinary and unfamiliar event, as something personally relevant to their own lives.

Disaster Preparedness Design That Begins with Questions

Mission: To plan and direct an exhibition on disaster preparedness at one of Japan’s leading design institutions.
Approach: By scattering questions about disaster preparedness throughout the venue, WOW created a structure in which visitors could engage with each work while forming their own views, creating an experience that would continue to resonate once they returned to everyday life and encouraging them to see disaster and disaster preparedness as matters of personal concern.

A Sense of Personal Connection Rooted in Tohoku

Chapter.1

The project’s origins trace back to InForms, WOW’s ongoing data visualization work. By drawing out the context behind the big data that reflects the state of society and giving it physical form, InForms actively stimulates the viewer’s curiosity and thinking — empowering not only “seeing,” but “observation” and “thought.” It was this capacity to give shape to information and draw out deeper observation and thought that caught the attention of the team at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, one of Japan’s leading design institutions, leading them to appoint WOW as exhibition director.

When it came to the theme of disaster preparedness, WOW brought a distinct perspective, drawing on a team with roots in Sendai and firsthand experience with disasters including the Great East Japan Earthquake. The exhibition planning and direction were led by three members from the Tohoku region: Hiroshi Ouchi, Saki Kato, and Kyomi Shiraishi. A complex reality emerged through repeated discussions: even among those who had experienced disaster firsthand, memories and perceptions of it varied according to individual circumstances and the degree of damage they had faced, meaning that awareness of disaster preparedness was never uniform. With this reality in mind, the team set out to create a space where people from diverse backgrounds could each consider disaster preparedness as their own concern, in a way suited to their own situation. Exploring a new approach, one that went beyond simply presenting logic or sounding an alarm, became the guiding challenge for this exhibition, which would put WOW’s strengths as a visual design studio to full use.

Arriving at the Concept of “Questions”

Chapter.2

How should disaster preparedness be unpacked and communicated? A planned exhibition at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT is not simply “a WOW solo exhibition.” As exhibition director, WOW was called on not only to produce its own work as a design studio, but also to bring together a range of outside creators and set a shared direction that would unite the entire team: in effect, to plant the flag around which everyone would gather. To shape the concept for the exhibition as a whole, the team pursued wide-ranging research, including internal discussions, literature review, and interviews with experts. A breakthrough in the planning process came through a single book: a Japanese edition of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, titled “What If You Were Attacked by a Crocodile? (Skills to avoid dying when it matters).” Compiling ultimate survival techniques for outlandish “what if” scenarios, the book revealed that thought experiments could serve as a switch for making disaster preparedness personally relevant.

An interview with Naoya Sekiya of the University of Tokyo, who provided academic supervision for the exhibition, also proved decisive in shaping the exhibition’s direction. Sekiya pointed out, for example, that traditions and folklore without scientific basis often carry within them people’s earnest hopes and wishes for others to survive. The team’s initial assumption that “there is no single right answer in disaster preparedness” was also reshaped by Sekiya’s advice that “there is a right answer, but it changes depending on the situation.” This insight led to the idea of installing a “public answer,” based on expert knowledge, on the reverse side of the venue’s massive pillar.

At the same time, the team made clear decisions about what not to do. Fieldwork at the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED) made it clear that an explanatory approach dealing with the mechanics of earthquakes themselves was already being handled well by specialist institutions. For that reason, while the exhibition did incorporate some practical knowledge, its aim was instead to draw out visitors’ active, self-directed sense of mental preparedness for disasters. In the simulation footage predicting tsunami damage, for instance, careful direction was applied so as not to provoke excessive fear in visitors or cause their thinking to freeze, such as masking severe data such as projected death tolls with black bars.

Curation and Content That Turn “Questions” into Experience

Chapter.3

21_21 DESIGN SIGHT takes on an entirely different character with each exhibition, and this time the venue was shaped around a maze-like structure called the Forest of Questions, designed by TORAFU ARCHITECTS. Within it, a diverse range of exhibited works, each with its own distinct perspective, unfolded one after another. For example, “Research on Carrier Pigeons for Disaster Relief” by Ken Nakajima, which imagines a worst-case scenario in which communication networks are cut off after a major disaster, and revives the highly analog practice of using racing pigeons as an emergency communication method, was deliberately placed opposite Starlink, the cutting-edge satellite network technology from KDDI Corporation. Elsewhere, the photographic work “Taking a Walk in Search of Disaster Prevention Signage,” disaster prevention signs within the cityscape revealed just how many life-saving signs are hidden within familiar urban scenery, while veig’s “Steam Garden” presented the disaster-preparedness function of urban green spaces as green infrastructure, including their role in the water cycle. This kind of deft contrast among the exhibited works reflects the curatorial skill behind the exhibition’s multifaceted approach to disaster preparedness.

New experiential installations that encourage visitors to intuitively reconsider their own approach to disaster preparedness were also a key part of the exhibition. “Disaster Preparedness Gradient” by Daihei Shibata lets visitors use buttons to visualize, in stages, quantities of stockpiled supplies and emergency goods, encouraging them to playfully consider, somewhere between “nowhere near enough” and “maybe overdoing it,” where their own sense of “preparedness” lies. “Moment by Moment,” by siro and Masaya Ishikawa, expressed the uncertainty brought by disaster in extremely simple terms, through an experience in which blocks stacked by visitors instantly collapse as a white circle in the projected video draws near. And “When the Snake Climbs the Tree,” by Mai Tsunoo, Yuma Koda, and Taku Sasaki, brought old sayings that go beyond scientific evidence into the present day through a contemporary song and illustration (song: Yuma Abe; illustration: Norio Nakamura).

At the heart of the exhibition’s experience design was WOW’s original work, “What if? – Answers from everyone,” a participatory installation that seamlessly blended the digital and the physical. Visitors entered their own answers to ten questions from their smartphones, which were then projected onto a massive video wall spanning the venue. At the end, visitors could choose an answer left by someone else that resonated with them and print it out as a sticker to take home; a designed circulation of information. Although a content filter had been prepared in advance to screen out inappropriate language in case of unexpected submissions, almost no malicious words were actually included. The directors were deeply moved to see how seriously visitors engaged in leaving their own words behind.

Toward a New Connection Between Design and Society

Chapter.4

For WOW, a studio that has built its strengths in non-verbal expression through video, CG, and installation work, deliberately placing words — questions — at the center of the experience design for this exhibition was a major challenge. As a result, the exhibition succeeded in building a bridge between the objective, rigorous knowledge held by universities and specialist institutions and a world of design capable of moving people emotionally. After it opened, the exhibition drew coverage from women’s fashion magazines, a rarity for design exhibitions of this kind, bringing in a younger audience, alongside a stream of requests for guided tours combined with corporate training sessions. The exhibition also sparked exchange with a broader range of people, including perspectives shared by visitors from overseas art circles, such as one who noted that in their own country, disaster preparedness also encompasses terrorism and other man-made disasters.

The fusion of a digital circulation of information via smartphones with a physical space that invites visitors to think through movement proved to be a success—one that took the sprawling, complex information behind a social issue, gave it shape and perspective, and distilled it into an experience that sparked spontaneous dialogue among visitors. In doing so, the project pointed to the significant potential for WOW, as a visual design studio, to offer new kinds of value to society going forward.

Credit

WOW Director : Hiroshi Ouchi, Saki Kato, Kyomi Shiraishi Art Director / Designer : Saki Kato Creative Strategist : Kyomi Shiraishi Web Designer / Movie Editor : Toko Taga Movie Editor : Haruka Kanno Movie Designer : Shinya Kikuchi, Yusuke Mizuno Technical Director / Programmer : Yuya Umeta Programmer : Yuki Horikawa, Seiya Takasawa, Ryonosuke Ono Sound Designer : Tomohiro Nagasaki Producer : Masahito Kodama Project Manager : Ryoma Yamashita “Research on Carrier Pigeons for Disaster Relief” Movie Director : Daisuke Takahira Recap Movie Designer : Kosuke Sugitani PROJECT TEAM Graphic Design : Taku Sasaki, Aki Kanai Space Design : TORAFU ARCHITECTS Construction : HIGURE 17-15 cas Text / Planning Associate : Mai Tsunoo Academic Support : Naoya Sekiya PARTICIPATING CREATORS veig, WOTA CORP., KDDI CORPORATION, Gehirn Inc., Shunichi Koshimura, Makiko Satake, Daihei Shibata, siro + Masaya Ishikawa, Mai Tsunoo + Yuma Koda + Taku Sasaki, Kosuke Tsumura, TORAFU ARCHITECTS + ISHINOMAKI LABORATORY, Ken Nakajima, Norio Nakamura, Nikkei Inc., JAPAN POST Co., Ltd. + Warehouse TERRADA, Nyanko Soba, Panoramatiks + Eukarya, VALUE BOOKS, Shigeru Ban Architects + Voluntary Architects' Network, Fukushima-Minpo Co., YAMAP INC., WOW, and others 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT Directors : Taku Satoh, Naoto Fukasawa Associate Director : Noriko Kawakami Program Manager : Takako Nakahora Program Officer : Moeto Yasuda Exhibition Organized by : 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, THE MIYAKE ISSEY FOUNDATION In Association with : Agency for Cultural Affairs; Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry; MINATO CITY BOARD OF EDUCATION Special Sponsor : Mitsui Fudosan Co., Ltd. Photographer : Keizo Kioku (Exhibition View) Videographer : Daisuke Ohki Assistant Videographer : Ryo Kamijo