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After being hit by a car at the age of seven, Kevin Yamada (MDes ’22) lost his leg below the knee.

Continuous trips between the hospital and home forced Yamada to grow up in a different environment than his friends. He yearned to not only express himself, but “I wanted to express that I was 100 percent OK,” Yamada says.

Within six months, he was able to run. He embraced the sport and ran track and field for his high school in the small city of Isehara, Japan. In 2004, before graduating, he became Japan’s national high school record holder for the 100-meter dash in the T44 category, created for para-athletes with lower limb impairments. His time was 12.64 seconds.

All that might help explain why Yamada, as a young man in his 20s, left a lucrative job at the largest general trading conglomerate in Japan to become a designer.

“I felt there was a missing piece of my business. I felt there was no human touch,” Yamada says.

Yes, he had been a project manager for Mitsui & Co.’s giant Indonesian power station and had managed business development for the entire Oceania region, but “I did not know much about the users there, the residents living there. We designed the equipment and sold to them, but I did not know about the users. It was so strange for me.”

Yamada wanted end-point users to be able to express themselves. And, in turn, to help companies serve them better.

After quitting his job and taking his five-year-old son to Chicago as he pursued a degree from the Institute of Design, Yamada got a job at BIOTOPE, a Tokyo-based strategic design firm. It seemed like a natural fit: a book by the company’s founder, Kunitake Saso (MDM ’13), had inspired him to pursue design in the first place.

Now, as the company’s managing partner and strategic designer—one who grew up within Japan’s extremely results-oriented business culture—Yamada feels a bit like a missionary bridging two worlds.

On the one hand, designers—of which there are not many in Japan, Yamada says—need to be more conscious of their clients’ immediate financial returns.

“At BIOTOPE, we have two kinds of clients,” he says. “Those interested in strategic design—short-sighted—who want outcomes as early as possible to increase business efficiency. The other is long-term sighted, interested in social issues. The big majority of our income is coming from the first side.”

But on the other hand, large Japanese corporations often suffer from what Yamada calls “slow culture...where they become big corporations but cannot make big innovations. They become so big, they forget about the missions they should pursue.”

Yamada recently wrote and released his own nonfiction book, , a #1 best seller in its category on Amazon, general industrial manufacturing.

But his long-term goal is to open a systemic design school in Japan, to grow what he calls “a very small community of 20 to 30 people to 1,000.

“If there are 1,000 systemic designers, every week they will build new systemic dynamics maps, one after another, and social issues will be dug into at a very deep level,” Yamada says. —Tad Vezner