RESHAPE TALENT INTERVIEW
JUN KAMEI

I was originally a material scientist and decided to change my career to pursue my interest in design.

“The Reshape competition came to a very crucial timing in my personal development in my design process, as I just finished my double masters at the Royal College of Art.  

I worked on the scenario of water level rise due to global warming. Research in the context leads me to realize that in less than 100 years, the human will need to live in cities which are partly submerged. I decided then to design an Amphibious gill garment for the citizen of a submerged future. The difficulty of the project was to match the level of speculative thinking and reality.

I spent a lot of time assessing what could really happen and to design pieces of technology to make the proposal credible.

At the Reshape Forum, I  enjoyed the multiple conversations with the organisers and the tutors/judges. To see how they react to my design was most beneficial for me. Also, seeing other talent and learning how they think was a great opportunity to discover some aspect of design and creativity that I did not know before.
Moreover, I enjoyed the conversation with Bradley from Iris Van Harpen, from the point of view of creativity. Talking with Valerie Bergeron, Director of Materfad was a great opportunity to learn about material development and seeing how the technology could be developed to a bigger scale.