閑（Itoma）
Read Between the Lines
Nearly a century ago, sociologist W.Zombart noted that leisure is “any expense spent on top of on necessities”. Any extra expense may not be mandatory to live the minimum standard of living, however, these are what actually delight your life. Court-life in the Baroque era was definitely full of luxury and extravagance, however W.Zombart emphasizes that the fundamentals of capitalism today were built upon the investment in production of mirrors for those courts. Philosopher G.Bohme highlights that any surplus consumption is the leisure in today’s life, but is something that is unavoidable.
ITOMA project looks into all sorts of leisure (surplus, desire, blank margin, luxury etc) that may not be mandatory for a minimum standard of living. Not the simple and frugal that directly links with productivity improvement, but a way of living that copes well with blank margin times. Methodologies the project undertakes will be on ethnography like the anthropologists do, new combinations of resources like the economist Schumpeter states, designing service through the service-dominant-logic perspective like the marketing domain does, and create ecosystems and institutions that will lead to a service design.
