The Japan Study Programme is a design research platform connecting workshops across distinct geographical and cultural contexts: a rural post-agricultural village, an inner-city neighbourhood in Tokyo and a woodland fabrication workshop. Across these contexts, creative design emerges through cyclical relationships between objects, local knowledge, skills and stories, guided by direct observation and community engagement as an economy of means. The programme encourages active observation and individual creative responses to the social and cultural landscapes of Japan. The interlinking nature of these workshops allows new knowledge to emerge through encounters between contrasting conditions, bringing together notions of the global and the local – GLOCAL.

A workshop exploring fabrication, furniture making and woodland construction. 

Hosted at Hooke Park, the AA's woodland campus in Dorset, this workshop focuses on hands-on material exploration and fabrication. Working exclusively with locally harvested timber and clay, participants will investigate the potential of combining digital and analogue making techniques, exploring how traditional craft practices can interact with contemporary fabrication tools.

The workshop centres on the playful and practical development of experimental artefacts, assemblies and spatial interventions that respond to the forest setting. Through collective material research, prototyping and site-aware design, participants will contribute to a new installation or construction within Hooke Park that reflects the workshop’s themes and the specific conditions encountered each year.

The emphasis is on process, collaboration and the imaginative rereading of the landscape, bringing together ideas of industry and craft, the bespoke and the multiple, and the poetic and the functional.

In association with Maeda Corporation as a core design research partner, the programme works with a range of cultural and civic institutions.