004: Cesar Jung Harada

This episode features a conversation with teacher, artist, entrepreneur (and a few more things)...Cesar Jung Harada. You can find out more about Cesar at his website, cesarharada.com.

Cesar's biography says: 

Cesar Jung-Harada is a French-Japanese designer, environmentalist, educator, and entrepreneur, passionate about ocean technology, impact innovation, and education based in Singapore. Cesar is an Associate Professor of Design at the Singapore Institute of Technology. Cesar is currently a candidate Ph.D. in Design and Ocean Innovation at the CNAM (France), Former Director of MakerBay LTD (Hong Kong Makerspace), Scoutbots LTD (Ocean Robotic Startup). Cesar serves as a Trustee of the board of HBKU (Qatar), the Wyng Foundation (Hong Kong), and regularly delivers workshops and keynotes at international conferences in places such as the UN, Harvard or TED. See his projects.

As you'll hear, I first met Cesar back in the late 2000s, where he was making an audacious project at the Royal College of Art, with a note that said 'join me' - so I did! That project took me on a wild journey, and I learnt a lot from it. Since then, Cesar has worked, lived, and taught around the world, with a wealth of weird and wonderful experiences that he brings back into all of the other roles he has. I really enjoyed this conversation - there is a lot of wisdom in Cesar's words.

Please note, this conversation was recorded in 2022, when Cesar was teaching in Hong Kong. Since then, Cesar has moved from Hong Kong to Singapore.

Links

• Cesar's website
• Cesar's academic profile
• Harada: the book Cesar made about his father, the sculptor Tetsuo Harada
• Simon Sinek's book: The Infinite Game (mentioned at around 1:10:00)

Chapters

00:00 Cesar's introduction
01:02 Ollie's introduction
06:05 Description of practice 
07:40 Mode of practice
17:15 Teaching
20:08 Hong Kong
27:16 Early education
35:32 Preferred teaching exercise
41:35 Life experience and design; barriers to entry
51:50 Learning from repetition 
55:14 Time management, and people management