Hiroshi Kawakami – författare

This book is about the "benefits of inconvenience (BoI)", providing a new approach to designing innovative systems and opening an alternative viewpoint to readers for looking at the world. BoI says that convenient living has “black boxed” the processes we used to rely on, while BoI is about looking at the benefits that were originally provided by these actions that have been black-boxed. Consider the relationship between humans and artificial objects, or things, newly created by engineering technology. In the past, things were “extensions” of people, but before we knew it, things began to substitute for people. BoI can be a keyword for thinking about the relationship that should come after “substitution”. It is a principle of systems design, one that requires time and effort rather than being convenient without any bother. Leading system scientists, technology creators, service producers, and product designers have contributed to this volume. In the first half of the book, manyresearchers describe their theory of BoI from the perspectives of systems engineers, value engineers, designers, and innovators. In the second half of the book, examples of implementing BoI are introduced in various fields, such as product design, service design, social robotics, tourism engineering, and human activity support systems. They will support innovations in systems or services. It is generally said that necessity is the mother of invention. In that belief, inconveniences should be eliminated, which can be a motive force for new technological development. On the other hand, this book shows that inconveniences are not something to be eliminated, but, on the contrary, are essential to obtain some benefit, and shows us how to create beneficial inconveniences.

This book is about the "benefits of inconvenience (BoI)", providing a new approach to designing innovative systems and opening an alternative viewpoint to readers for looking at the world. BoI says that convenient living has “black boxed” the processes we used to rely on, while BoI is about looking at the benefits that were originally provided by these actions that have been black-boxed. Consider the relationship between humans and artificial objects, or things, newly created by engineering technology. In the past, things were “extensions” of people, but before we knew it, things began to substitute for people. BoI can be a keyword for thinking about the relationship that should come after “substitution”. It is a principle of systems design, one that requires time and effort rather than being convenient without any bother. Leading system scientists, technology creators, service producers, and product designers have contributed to this volume. In the first half of the book, manyresearchers describe their theory of BoI from the perspectives of systems engineers, value engineers, designers, and innovators. In the second half of the book, examples of implementing BoI are introduced in various fields, such as product design, service design, social robotics, tourism engineering, and human activity support systems. They will support innovations in systems or services. It is generally said that necessity is the mother of invention. In that belief, inconveniences should be eliminated, which can be a motive force for new technological development. On the other hand, this book shows that inconveniences are not something to be eliminated, but, on the contrary, are essential to obtain some benefit, and shows us how to create beneficial inconveniences.

This book is the first to gather vivid, down-to-earth examples showing that inconvenience often brings real benefits. There is a common belief that faster, easier, and more efficient is always better, but this is not necessarily true. Unlike heavy, abstract philosophical works questioning that belief, this book takes a very different approach, presenting concrete, relatable stories from everyday life and a wide range of disciplines. The reader then sees how inconvenience can lead to sharper thinking, deeper understanding, and unexpected insights.From small frictions that spark creativity to deliberate inefficiencies that produce richer experiences, the book makes a strong case for the fact that some of the most meaningful gains appear only when things are not perfectly smooth. Stretching the mind, creating something new, or seeing the world from a fresh angle thus offers the powerful insight that some benefits cannot be achieved without inconvenience. The latter half of the book features a unique reverse index, organizing examples by academic field. Whether the reader’s interests lean toward science, engineering, design, education, or the humanities, a quick look at the contents may reveal surprising connections to a particular discipline or answer a question that simply arises out of curiosity.

This book is the first to gather vivid, down-to-earth examples showing that inconvenience often brings real benefits. There is a common belief that faster, easier, and more efficient is always better, but this is not necessarily true. Unlike heavy, abstract philosophical works questioning that belief, this book takes a very different approach, presenting concrete, relatable stories from everyday life and a wide range of disciplines. The reader then sees how inconvenience can lead to sharper thinking, deeper understanding, and unexpected insights.From small frictions that spark creativity to deliberate inefficiencies that produce richer experiences, the book makes a strong case for the fact that some of the most meaningful gains appear only when things are not perfectly smooth. Stretching the mind, creating something new, or seeing the world from a fresh angle thus offers the powerful insight that some benefits cannot be achieved without inconvenience. The latter half of the book features a unique reverse index, organizing examples by academic field. Whether the reader’s interests lean toward science, engineering, design, education, or the humanities, a quick look at the contents may reveal surprising connections to a particular discipline or answer a question that simply arises out of curiosity.

The Painlevé equations were discovered as nonlinear ordinary differential equations that define new special functions, and their importance has long been recognized. Since the 1990s, there have been many studies on various generalizations of the Painlevé equations such as discretizations, higher dimensional analogues, quantizations, and so on. The aim of this book is to provide a unified approach to understand higher dimensional analogues of the Painlevé equations from the viewpoint of the deformation theory of linear ordinary differential equations. Especially, a detailed study will be given when the phase spaces of their Hamiltonian systems are four dimensional. More specifically, starting from the classification of the Fuchsian equations with four accessory parameters, we construct a degeneration scheme of linear equations by considering confluences of singular points. Then we write down the Hamiltonians of the Painlevé-type equations associated with these resulting linear equations. The following topics are explained together with examples: spectral types of linear equations, a method to calculate the Hamiltonians, confluences of singularities and degenerations of the Painlevé-type equations, the correspondence between linear equations or their spectral types through the Laplace transform. In addition, Appendix 1 discusses symmetries of moduli spaces of linear equations. As its application, it is shown that the equations obtained in this book constitute a complete list of 4-dimensional Painlevé-type equations corresponding to unramified linear equations. Appendix 2 gives a list of the 4-dimensional Painlevé-type equations corresponding to ramified linear equations.Published by Mathematical Society of Japan and distributed by World Scientific Publishing Co. for all markets