Ryuta Aoki is a concept designer and social scupltor. He is the founder of VOLOCITEE, METACITY, ALIFE Lab, ALTERNATIVE MACHINE, The TEA-ROOM and TEDxKids@Tokyo. He participated in a 2017 program 'The Child in the City: Health, Parks and Play'.

"I participated in The Child in the City Health, Parks and Play in 2017. This event was one of the first times that I started to tackle the subject of cities. Until then, I had never had a focused discussion on the subject of the relationship between urban nature and children's health, and it was a great learning experience. I still remember that the research work I did later in the process of translating the statement into Japanese further increased my understanding of this field.

In 2019, I founded METACITY, a research team that explores the form of possible cities through thought experiments and prototyping and doing speculative projects with artists, researchers, and engineers. One of these projects is Bio Sculpture, a project to create an ecology using one of the world's largest 3D printers, which can stretch up to 30 meters. This is not just about technology for "today's" humans, but about technology for the next few generations, or more specifically, about technology for multi-species.

I believe that this idea was inspired by the discussions at the Salzburg Global Seminar (it's not translated into English yet). Very gratefully, this project was awarded the Social Impact Prize in the Art Division (Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award) at the 25th Japan Media Arts Festival, an international media arts festival that has been going on for 25 years. I believe that the above work would not have been created without my participation in the Salzburg Global Seminar. Thank you very much for this precious opportunity.