This report discusses the implementation of the forum “Engineering and Liberal Arts”, held on March 23, 2022 as a project of the Humanities and Engineering Cultural Research Group. Tomonari YASHIRO (the University of Tokyo; Innovation Management), Kotaro IMAI (the University of Tokyo; Architecture), and Yasuo KOBAYASHI (the University of Tokyo; Architecture, philosophy) delivered lectures during the forum. Yoshinori YOKOYAMA (the University of Tokyo; social system design), Takatsugu Kitajima (TMI Associates; lawyer) and Riina TOYA (the University of Tokyo; Applied Humanities) joined the forum as discussant. This report features the summary of the lectures and the following discussions.

This article is an abstract of the opening remarks of the forum “Engineering and the Liberal Arts” organized by the Research Group on Culturally-Informed Engineering on March 23, 2022, with some additions to the content. In addition to the purpose of the forum, I expressed a few personal thoughts.

Here I consider how we would “design” a curriculum for the “engineering liberal arts education” program targeting students at the University of Tokyo, College of Arts and Sciences. It is based on my presentation given at the forum held on March 23, 2022 and the main purpose here is not to consider the actual feasibility. Rather, it is an attempt from the liberal arts point of view to design a model to be used as the starting point for discussion.

In July 2019, supporting alumni of the University of Tokyo EMP Program cooperated with IIS to launch “Culture X Engineering” as a research group open to all University of Tokyo faculty and EMP alumni. By this point in August 2022, the group has already met twenty-seven times. In addition to researchers with expertise in a wide variety of fields, professionals also participate in the group, helping to promote “HSP” (Humanities-Science-Professional) collaboration. This report on the group’s activities in 2021 provides an outline of each meeting’s contents, as well as a discussion of the group’s achievements, the challenges it has faced, and its prospects for the future.

The present paper is an annotated report of the author’s interview with Dr. MORI Masahiro, a renounced pioneer of robotics in Japan, in the NHK E-television program (broadcast on June 30, 2019) entitled “The Idea of Fusing Duality into Unity as a Bridge between Engineering and Buddhist Thought.” In some sense, it may be said that the idea of fusing a dichotomy into unity constitutes the core principle of Buddhist thought. According to Dr. Mori, this principle is also applied in developing and utilizing various technological devices. How to harmonize accelerating with braking is a central concern in the task of making a car and driving it as well. Moreover, he emphasizes that there is another aspect of the same principle which plays an important role in the Buddhist notion of good and bad. That is, the dichotomy of good and bad should be traced back to the common ground that is inexpressible in either way. In other word, the bad may be converted to the good by means of turning it back to that inexpressible, but the mental control is regarded as a requirement for this end. Since any technological product may serve for good and bad, how to harmonize the technological development with the ethical dimension should be one of the inevitable issues for the future of human beings and even of the earth. In this paper the author presents several aspects of Dr. Mori’s philosophy of “monozukuri wa hitozukuri” (To develop things is to develop mind) because the author thinks that his philosophy will cast a light of hope for the solution of that issue.

Researchers in the field of engineering often refer to the “human-artifact relationship.” Viewed from a medium- to longterm perspective, that relationship becomes a matter of interest for historians as well. This paper focuses on the mirror as an artifact that had a significant latent influence on people’s self-perception. In Japan, industrial production of plate glass—and thus, of glass plane mirrors as well—became possible in the Meiji period. For the first time, people encountered their own image in mirrors in practically the same way that people do today, and they demonstrated a wide range of reactions. This paper focuses on that period as a “historical mirror stage” underlying the development of the modern self and differences in national traits.

After 30 years, “Social System Design” faces the paradigm shift. The major driving force is technology, or, more specifically, “Internet, Sensor and Digital Technology）. Its rapid development and expansion of applications change the mind-set of people. New design of Social Systems has to be able to handle the new situation.The vicious circles spread widely caused by the fact that the general public makes decisions based on outdated information because they cannot catch up with the rapid pace of the scientific development. Enhancing science literacy is a major issue.

TOD (transit-oriented development), a method of urban planning focusing on public transportation services has been regarded as effective in solving urban problems which became more and more serious in recent years. In order to propose feasible development methods for achieving sustainable urban planning, our works established an evaluation system on indicators of TODs and applied it in actual development projects. This paper shows an evaluation example of TOD redevelopment projects around the Shibuya station area using Network theory. By constructing a pedestrian network with building nodes and evaluating the centrality of traffic flow, it was found that a part of spatial distribution of pedestrian flow will be widened, and congestion will be alleviated after the redevelopment.

A mechanism is needed to consolidate information on the overall configuration and status of components for rapid failure location estimation of building services, such as in the event of a disaster. In addition, computerized support for response planning is effective for dealing with limited human resources. Based on this idea, an autonomous decentralized functional network model was conceived, and its data structure architecture and an algorithm for supporting the narrowing down of the failure location to be checked were studied. The application of the model was verified using the water supply system of a university facility as an example.

The wide-area, high-spatial-density accelerometer observation network could be the enabler of health monitoring of buildings’ structures over a long period. Smartphones could be seen as a sort of MEMS accelerometer from which collected data are easily collectable through an information network. This paper evaluates to what extent smartphones are usable as an accelerometer by measuring the microtremor of a two-story detached house. The paper also discusses the issues that can restrict the development of the integrated observation system composed of interconnected sensors that different parties use.