Interview: Hiroaki Miyata
Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan will feature eight signature themed pavilions. The organisers challenged their curators to aim high, bringing the most important ideas of our times to life in both physical and virtual spaces. The signature pavilions and the programme of events associated with them are intended to inspire Expo attendees to think about life in its many facets and to encourage creative action. Such endeavours could begin with small efforts for the sake of others and the planet, eventually building into a movement for positive change in line with the Expo’s theme of ‘designing future society for our lives’.
This time we spoke with data scientist Hiroaki Miyata, who has been tasked with producing the ‘Resonance of Lives’ pavilion. Miyata is noted for his work on Japan’s National Clinical Database, an archive of surgery-related information aimed at improving medical care across the country through the cooperation of more than 5,600 hospitals and other care facilities. He was also instrumental in organising the surveys of Covid-19 symptoms among the public that were conducted by the Japanese government via the messaging app Line during the pandemic.
We sat down with Miyata, who is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Policy Management at the Faculty of Medicine at Keio University, to understand his ambitions for the Resonance of Lives project and to get the background on his idea of ‘Better Co-Being’, which forms the core of the pavilion’s programme.
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