Diagrams as a shared language

Why diagrams

At ZUKAI, we use diagrams as a tool to create an environment where people can deliver their own voice to society.

Today, with environmental change driven by technology, the spread of new values, and shifts in the international situation, the issues society faces are growing more complex. To grasp and act on these conditions, discourse unfolds daily, new concepts and ideas are born, and information circulates.

Yet those concepts and ideas are not always in a form that is easy for everyone to understand.

The learning cost of grasping difficult concepts, and the communication cost of accurately understanding one another, become enormous. The burden this places on each individual is far too great. When people face this cost head-on, many feel “this seems somehow difficult” and avoid confronting the issue. As they keep avoiding it, that sense of difficulty grows over time. People find it hard to voice opinions about things they don’t understand. As a result, they become unable to see society as their own concern, and society gradually feels like a distant entity.

Meanwhile, only those who can pay that cost—those with the margin to do so—can get close to society. Only a portion of people who hold that information can understand the state of society and reflect their opinions onto it. When people try to communicate in this state, power relationships arise. Depending on the presence or absence of knowledge, one voice becomes weak and another becomes strong. This is unhealthy communication. What this unhealthiness signifies is an imbalance of power. In other words, those who can feel a real sense of moving society directly—those who are close to society—are limited to a powerful few.

So at ZUKAI, by making diagrams as a communication tool, we want to get past that unhealthy state. As a “common language,” our diagrams open complex information to more people, and give them the power to make it their own, use it, and share it. Once the loudness of a voice no longer depends on who happens to know, people can keep talking over the same structure even while their positions stay different. That is what we mean by going beyond either/or.

What is zukai

What we mean by “zukai”

When people hear “diagram,” they may picture a picture. What we mean is putting something complex into a structure, in a form everyone can see the same way. This site is built on the same idea. How much moved, how many copies of which book sold — we lay it out as structure rather than summarising it.

A diagram as a “common language” is a tool that organizes and structures information about a particular theme (a concept, a social issue, and so on) using a shared format—lowering the barrier to understanding while reducing the cost of communicating with others. What one person is thinking is invisible to others. That is exactly why what we want to convey often fails to get across, and discussions turn into crossed wires. By having a tool—a diagram—that visualizes the inside of your head clearly for the outside so the same understanding can be shared, we lower the communication cost of accurately understanding one another.

Our diagrams organize and structure information into a shared format. As long as you grasp the rules, then regardless of differences in prior understanding of the subject, you can share literacy with others through the diagram and align differences in perception during communication. In other words, diagrams function as a communication tool.

We simplify, but we do not split in two

We make complex things workable while they stay complex. We do not reduce them to a picture of opposition for the sake of being easy to grasp.

Contrast is a doorway, not the point

Contrast draws attention, but it is not the substance. It is useless if nobody arrives, so we use it as a doorway — and then keep going, raising the resolution.

How we make it

We do not make them alone

ZUKAI invents diagrams as a “common language” by collaborating with experts. Experts at companies, research institutions, governments, and elsewhere share their expertise with us, and we structure that information into diagrams that are easier for more people to understand and convey.

In other words, there is always someone from outside in the making.

• Policy Modelthe people who make policy / the people who live with it

  The format took shape over four years from 2019, through interviews with bureaucrats who volunteered and repeated workshops that included ministry staff.

• Environmental Issues Mapresearchers / people encountering it for the first time

  What to include and what to leave out. Where we were unsure, repeated discussion with the National Institute for Environmental Studies brought it to its present form.

• Issue Mapthe people inside the issue / the people working to solve it

  When we mapped a region's issues, we went to the region, listened to the people involved, and built it from there. It is not made once and finished: it stays open to be rewritten.

Experts are not collaborators standing outside us. A diagram is something you place between the person who knows and the person about to know. It does not hold up if either is missing.

• We run training and workshops using the common languages and methods ZUKAI has developed.What we do →
• To read about the common languages we have built so far, see each one in detail.Frameworks →