FabCafe To Host the ‘Global Goals Jam’ alongside The UNDP and Digital Society School in Tokyo To Empower Creators to Solve Global Challenges

“There is No Plan B, Because There is No Planet B” – Ban Ki Moon, former United Nations Secretary General

In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly established the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. The SDGs are global goals that serve as a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future, an urgent call for action for all countries – developed and developing – to end poverty and other deprivations, improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth, while also tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests in a global partnership, according to the UN.

The challenges highlighted by the SDGs are not new. Everyday, people struggle with poverty, inequality, food insecurity and the catastrophic results of global warming. These challenges are so complex that they can’t be solved with a single disciple, mindset or expertise alone.

With the power of the internet, we are more connected than ever before and more and more people are watching from the sidelines, witnessing the social woes around the world and wondering, “What can I do?” When liking and sharing posts are not enough, events like the Global Goals Jam (GGJ) give anyone from anywhere a chance to brainstorm together with people from diverse backgrounds and actually make something that will contribute to solving these problems.

FabCafe is proud to announce that it will serve as the official host and organizer for the United Nations Development Program and Digital Society School’s Global Goals Jam in Tokyo, Japan, for the third year in a row.

The Global Goals Jam engages makers and designers of all backgrounds around the world to contribute towards achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 through innovative design thinking, using the Digital Society School’s Jamkit.

While the UN holds an annual Social Good Summit, where people around the world share their stories, projects and visions for the future, the two-day Global Goals Jam brings creative and design teams to work in short sprints towards tangible results.

The jams are ideathon and hackathon that utilizes a custom-made design process – developed by the Digital Society School at the United Nations Development Program’s request – that empowers the design community to create direct impact for the global goals, solving local challenges relevant to their own context.

The Digital Society School Design Method Toolkit is a collection of categorized, time-based design and research methods to help creators to plan and execute their design research, ideation, experimentation and creation within short iterations. The toolkit focuses on eliminating the idea of “design waste” and thus ensuring a new and more sustainable mindset to reach the SDGs by 2030.

Using the tailored Design Method Toolkit, multidisciplinary teams of creatives, researchers and sustainability experts will create interventions aimed at short term targets in support of the long term goals. The processes and results are then shared with the global network of cities and organizations so that the community can build up on each other’s work to create real impact.

The Global Goals Jam was founded in 2016, with 17 cities participating. It has now expanded to more than 85 cities around the world in its fourth year. Thousands of change makers have used the methodology and are now part of a growing learning community around the SDGs and designing 2030.

Fueled by a shared passion for social good, participants in previous jams were able to borrow from each other’s diverse professional and personal backgrounds to come up with a challenge and solution that reflected not only their local situation but brought them together as individuals who want to do and make something but aren’t sure how.

In addition to gaining valuable methods of the custom Global Goals Jamkit, the event differs from traditional styles of education and training, creating a common language and using a shared process of design methods to build on each other’s works. 

Previous attendees have noted how the jam is a valuable and empowering exercise in hyper community-building with people who share a passion for sustainability for social impact through ideation and prototyping. 

“What is great about GGJ is the fact that you bring in people from diverse backgrounds, and therefore discussions become more complex and multi-perspective, which reflects how society works in real life. The process and design of GGJ allows different ways to visualize ideas, making sure every individual has a way to contribute and present ideas in their own preferred style. At the end of the workshop, I believe all of my team members learned that the SDGs are quite complicated and there is no ‘perfect’ solution to each issue. At the same time, however, we were electrified to solve our goal from the very beginning, which to me, indicated that there are passionate people out there who are willing to challenge and overcome global issues,” said Yuuki Guzman, a facilitator at GGJ Tokyo 2018 from Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University.

Come expand your network and learn design methods from Digital Society School and share your ideas for how to solve the world’s problems in real-time with other participants from Hong Kong, Nairobi, Kyoto, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam and beyond!

Let’s design 2030 together! Think Big! Start Small! Act Fast! 

The Tokyo event will be held over the weekend of September 21 to 22 at 100BANCH Loft. The event will be in both Japanese and English. Attendees can expect to come away with a prototype for real interventions in a local context. Prototype examples include, but are not limited to, paper, carton, physical 3D printed or handmade prototypes, visual 3D models or rendering, commercials and advertisement videos for the product, and storyboards. Presentations and the Afterparty are open to the public. The event page to signup can be found on the FabCafe website.

EVENT INFORMATION

Date & time:
09:00 – 18:30 Saturday September 21, 2019
10:00 – 19:00 Sunday September 22, 2019 (After party from 19:00 in the same location)

Location:
100BANCH LOFT (3F), 3 – 27 – 1 Shibuya, Tokyo

Organized by: FabCafe, Digital Society School, The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

Supported by:  Panasonic, 100BANCH

Price:
¥3,000 for non-students, ¥1,500 for students*
*Ticket includes light refreshments. Please bring your own mug for coffee and tea.

Capacity:
50

Day 1　Schedule:
09:00 – 9:30 Gathering / Registration
09:30 – 10:00 Inspiration Talk
10:00 – 12:00 Icebreaking / Team Building

Sprint #1 Explore it!
12:00 – 13:15 Team Canvas / Empathy Map / Brainstorm
13:15 – 14:30 Lunch Break

Sprint #2 Respond to it!
14:30 – 16:20 Ideation / Concept sketch / Dot voting

Sprint # 3 Make it!
16:20 – 16:40 Break / Energizer game
16:40 – 18:30 Storyboard / Solution pitch / Feedback
18:30 ~ Free prototyping time

 Day 2　Schedule:
Sprint #3 Make, cont.
09:00 – 11:00 Prototyping time

Sprint #4 Share it!
11:00 – 13:30 Business model canvas / Through other’s eyes
13:30 – 17:00 Final touches
17:00 – 17:15 Turn in materials

Final Presentations & Afterparty!
17:30 – 18:45 Final presentations
18:45 – 19:00 Wrap up
19:00 ~ GGJ Afterparty!

Check out the event reports for the 2018 and 2017 Tokyo Global Goals Jams.
Join the Global Goals Jam Tokyo community on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

‘Global Goals Jam’ is supported by AWRD 
AWRD is an online platform for organizers to host and manage campaigns, from large-scale international competitions to one-day hackathons. With AWRD, operations such as entries collection, landing page generation, judge appointment, screening process, and result announcements could be managed easily online with just a few clicks. Email us for a free trial today: awrd@loftwork.com

Loftwork Inc. is a global creative company, which designs programs, spaces, services, communication and websites through collaborations. We are located in Hong kong, Taiwan, Tokyo and Kyoto . We also operate various owned media and platforms. Digital craft cafe “FabCafe” , and material design lab “MTRL” , the online creator platform “AWRD”, and an open community bio lab “BioClub“.  Loftwork is dedicated in building a global community of innovators. Through the design process, we create good impact to society.