Enzo Mari Workshop in Osaka, Japan

Following on from our Enzo Mari workshops in 2024 and 2025, Bob Richmond and Clarissa Berning are travelled to Japan in October 2025. The aim of the journey was to learn about Japanese methodologies and techniques, and to foster new dialogue around social design, in particular in relation to the democratising of making processes and their evenly-distributed outcomes. Enzo Mari had a long-standing collaboration with Muji, and we wish to continue this form of debate. The applicability of Mari’s Autoprogettazione in this context is freely open to question, and ultimately Mari’s design thinking has most potency when viewed as starting place, a release agent for creative agency.

The workshops were completed at the Osaka Ruskin Morris Center / Community Learning Design Center, (ORMC / CDLC) located at Nose, Osaka, and were received with much enthusiasm and ignited conversations about the power of hands-on making as an educational tool for knowledge-transfer and in creating important platforms for dialogue. The design and concept of Enzo Mari's Autoprogettazione was unknown to our audience, which was composed of community members from Nose, a senior Osaka town councillor, academics from Tokyo and Hokkaido, and students and members of the Studio L and Team Clapton design practices.

In exchange we learnt much about the Community Design practice of Studio L, and its contribution to extensive community engagement and the wider social and political discourse between Japan and the UK.

We have built substantial dialogue and are now laying plans for future collaborations, in both the UK and Japan. New collaborative frameworks to include the partners: Studio L, ORMC / CDLC, Team Clapton, the Design History Research Centre, Tokyo, Ishinomaki Lab (Japan), and The Guild of St George.

We have also created a new platform for The Guild of St George’s network of Anglo-Japanese collaborations: Ruskin in Practice, dialogues between Japan and the UK

The journey has been made possible with the generous support of The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and The Guild of St George