The Ways to New

Chapter 18Anticipation-Driven Disruption

TBWA/Hakuhodo has shown itself to be incredibly good at leveraging collective intelligence.

The project, called Mirai Nihon,¹ was an extraordinary one. Our Japanese agency decided to design the first ever off-grid house in the world. Having the idea was not enough: we turned ourselves into an architecture firm, a real estate developer and project supervisor. We coordinated twenty different subcontractors and crowdsourced ideas from more than five hundred engineers and scientists.

Mirai Nihon: The Future of Japan

The idea originated after the terrible tsunami that hit Japan in 2011. TBWA Tokyo's managing director was determined to make some kind of spectacular and concrete contribution to the country's new energy policy. Naturally, such a commitment extended far beyond his usual duties and field of expertise. And who could ever have imagined that one day an advertising agency would find itself collaborating on a daily basis with entities such as JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, to design a house? And then build it.

The tsunami swept away our Japanese employees' vision of the world they lived in. Suddenly, Japanese infrastructure systems seemed frail. Power could no longer be taken for granted. A decision was made that it would be good to design a house that would not be reliant on the usual power, gas, water, and telecom networks: a self-sufficient house, in which nature and technology would act together in mutual support. ...