Synecoculture Association

Discover

Putting the essence into words.

Synecoculture and augmented ecosystems are both concepts that are hard to sum up in a word, so I started by understanding their essence. When I first began researching, what came to mind was "a farming method in which people intervene in the ecosystem to grow crops without tilling, fertilizers, or pesticides." But if that were all, it wasn't clear how it differed from natural or organic farming. The scope of augmented ecosystems, however, goes beyond agriculture to cities and healthcare. As I read through the papers, I came to see that each living thing supporting an ecosystem has its own role, and that humans, too, can become part of it as "designers." Augmented ecosystems are what bring about benefits beyond the natural state as a result, and Synecoculture is the vision of building civilization itself on that foundation. Only then did a phrase I had heard in a meeting, "augmented ecosystems are a civilizational mechanism," finally come into focus.

This discovery led directly to the site's catchphrase. Before I understood it deeply, I would probably have written 命を紡ぐ ("weaving life"); once I had grasped its essence, it became 命と紡ぐ ("weaving with life"). Rather than people nurturing life one-sidedly, we weave the future together with other living things. That whole difference rests on a single Japanese particle, or in English, on the word "with."

Storytelling

Finding a point of empathy.

A concept as far-reaching as augmented ecosystems doesn't get across if you try to explain it head-on all at once. So I designed the home page as a short "journey" in which understanding deepens the further you scroll. At its entrance, I placed a question about a conflict that anyone might feel.

Human progress or environmental protection—must we choose one over the other? As the world sways between these polarized values, we ask a different question: Is there a path that honors both?

Our Story

If this question lives in people's hearts as an unspoken voice, it should draw them into the story here. The line "Creating nature that surpasses nature" then shakes up their biases, and the value of augmented ecosystems is translated into "four benefits": productivity, health, cities, and disaster prevention. The angles differ, but at bottom they all come down to a wish everyone shares: to live a healthy life. By the time visitors finish reading, an abstract concept has become a story about their own lives. That is the aim of this journey.

Art Direction

Turning words into pictures.

Pollinators such as birds and bees gather around plants and trees. At the entrance to the site, I placed a slideshow of photos of Synecoculture farms and cities, cut out in a shape that traces that silhouette. Because the client can freely add slides from the admin, the Synecoculture landscapes yet to come will grow into the site's own color. Slides can also be made into links, so the paths to pages the client especially wants people to see can be shown first. The idea is to convey the worldview of augmented ecosystems, in which living things weave an ecosystem through their relationships with one another, first through real scenery, so that visitors read on with a picture in mind before the words.

Another important keyword is the "diet-environment-health trilemma": the structural problem of our time that food production, environmental conservation, and human health cannot all be achieved at once. Solving this problem is the association's reason for being. But since it is hard to grasp from words alone, I broke it down into the idea of "a structure that cannot exist in reality" and expressed it through a triangular optical illusion that evokes it.

It was also important to convey how to solve the diet-environment-health trilemma. The client wanted to convey it "with the image of a tripod that animates as you scroll," and even provided rough sketches. However, because the concept itself is a collection of several concepts, rather than simply animating a diagram, I decided to present it as an autoplaying carousel with an explanation added to each step. The tripod animation serves as a guide for understanding the concept.

Because it deals with academic content, the site inevitably has a lot of text. So for key points, I added visual signs that give specialist topics a softer expression. At the same time, I kept the icon lines bold and black and limited the fills to gradient accent colors, so the overall impression wouldn't become too light.

Branding

Turning research journals into a good read.

The blog, which had been actively updated on the old site, was a hidden gem: an approachable record of the researchers' daily activities. But as long as it looked like "a researchers' blog," its appeal might not reach "people who aren't interested in research." So I renamed it シネコな話 (Syneco na Hanashi, roughly "Syneco Talk") and added a playful logo, turning it into reading that anyone can casually dip into. It was a somewhat bold proposal, but the researchers embraced it, and it has become one of the gateways connecting academia and society.

CMS

Growing the site.

The key to this site was that the researchers themselves could keep up their day-to-day publishing. So I customized the WordPress admin in detail specifically for Synecoculture, so that the whole site can be updated without difficulty and without specialist knowledge. I also designed the layout and visual details so that the design stays consistent no matter who updates it, letting the accumulation of posts become the color of the site (and, by extension, of Synecoculture) itself.

For example, open a project page and you can see who is involved in the project. Open a member's page and you can see at a glance which projects that member is working on. Normally, each page would have to be updated by hand, doubling the work. So I customized the system so that members can be linked to projects and that information is also used on the member pages. Member information only needs to be managed in one place; the connections between projects and members then reach every part of the site and stay up to date wherever they're referenced.

Data Migration

Bringing two sites together as one.

Synecoculture's website was originally split across two WordPress installations: the association's main site and a blog site. Merging them was one of the requirements, but it turned out that moving the blog posts over as they were would collide with the main site's data. So I wrote migration scripts that automatically converted the blog posts into a dedicated post type, and their categories and tags into dedicated taxonomies. This eliminated the gaps and omissions that come with copying by hand, making the migration both reliable and fast.

I also migrated the Synecoculture Manual, previously managed as standalone HTML pages, into WordPress, so that it too can be managed and updated in multiple languages. The body of research can now be managed and published in the same place as the rest of the site's content.

Localization

Found from around the world, in each language.

The old site was available in Japanese and partly in English; with this redesign, it expanded to four languages: Japanese, English, French, and Chinese. Since translating everything into four languages would be an enormous task, only the main pages were translated, and untranslated pages display a notice in each language saying so. I worked out the system and design so that the client can keep translating at their own pace after launch. Rather than simply switching the text on display, each language is generated as its own page, so the content reaches search engines and visitors from abroad in the right language. And because not only translated content but even new languages can be managed from the admin, if another language is needed in the future, the client can handle it themselves without any development work.

Accessibility

So that anyone can find their way around.

Making sure everyone can receive information equally is essential for an organization that aims to be open to society. Although there was no external audit this time, I designed the site to an accessibility level equivalent to WCAG 2.2 Level AA, so that diverse users can reach information without difficulty, whatever their environment.

Client

Synecoculture Association

Project type

Branding, Website

Creative Direction

Kazunori Miura

Art Direction

Kazunori Miura

Information Design

Kazunori Miura

Copywriting

Kazunori Miura

Graphic Design

Kazunori Miura

UI/UX Design

Kazunori Miura

Front-end Development

Kazunori Miura

WordPress Development

Kazunori Miura

Launch

2025.11

Related Link

synecoculture.org/en/