The Yasuaki Kakehi Laboratory (xlab) at the University of Tokyo will hold xlab Showcase 2026, presenting a comprehensive selection of this year’s research outcomes, prototypes, and works. The showcase will take place over three days, from Friday, February 20 to Sunday, February 22, 2026, at the Engineering Building 2, Hongo Campus. In addition to the exhibition of research and artworks, we will also hold poster sessions by lab members and a talk with a guest, fostering multifaceted discussions.
This year’s theme This is not ice is inspired by René Magritte’s celebrated work Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). Just as a drawn image is not the real thing itself, what we call real does not preexist as independent entities. Instead, it continually emerges through the processes in which diverse agencies—environmental, material, human, and informational—mutuallyintra-act.
Ice, for instance, is often regarded as a symbol of something solid and immobile. Yet in reality, it constantly changes with the surrounding temperature from its not-yet-ice stage, to the lingering transition of no longer being ice, to the instants in which it is about to become ice (or just ceased to be ice). From this perspective, we reconsider materials not as mere tools or objects, but as co-creative entities that continuously change and generate with their surrounding environment.
Furthermore, when not and ice are joined, the word notice emerges—reflecting a perspective central to xlab’s research practice. These moments of notice include: the instant when the material reveals an unexpected expression; the indication that an assumption has slightly shifted; or the subtle change in the relationships between humans and more-than-human entities. By facing these moments of noticing and designing accordingly, our research and works aim to gently, but surely, transform how the world is perceived.
At these venues, we invite you to experience the practices of material experience design using various material and matter, as well as the many forms of noticing that exist within them.
