How do you solve a geopolitical problem like Kim Jong Un? Containment? Embargoes? Propaganda? Regime change? Synchronized baseball?
Yosuke Ushigome is a designer and technologist, and not a diplomat, which explains why his solution is a little unorthodox. He invented the hybrid sport of synchronized baseball, which combines the mass gymnastics heritage of North Korea with baseball, a national pastime in Japan and South Korea, as a way of settling the differences on the Korean Peninsula.
Ushigome's proposal, which he developed into a video for a series called "Commoditised Warfare" as part of his MA project at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, has as its core the idea to replace war and conflict with spectacles that have a competitive and voyeuristic appeal to them. Hence, the giant model stadium ship he engineered, to be commandeered by the United Nations and moored in the Sea of Japan. On board the ship, the warring sides would battle it out for the prize of peace.
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