Design
Installations/Displays - Temporary
Bronze Winner
Inakadate Village
"Rice Code"
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Corporate Name of Client: Inakadate Village
Client Supervisor: Takatoshi Asari
Agency: Hakuhodo Inc., Tokyo
Executive Creative Directors: Kazuhiro Suda/Airo Takanohashi
Creative Director: Takahiro Eguchi
Copywriters: Masako Shimizu/Kei Nakamura
Art Director: Keita Kojima
Agency Producer: Takashi Anbo
Digital Designer: Akihiro Okada
Project Curator : Masateru Kametani
Editor: Tomohiro Matsumoto
Technical Director : Hirochika Matsuo
Production Producer : Takehito Shina
Production Manager: Koki Yamaguchi
Concept/Cultural Reference:
A small village in northeast Japan famous for rice, Inakadate, was struggling with aging and declining population along with a drop in rice sales, since Japanese eating habits have shifted away from rice toward a more Westernised food. Nevertheless, the village’s main income source remains rice. So we tried to re-energize the village by creating a fusion of agriculture and digital technology. We created huge art pictures in our rice field by planting different colors of rice. We then developed a new technology called “rice-code,” which let visitors scan the rice art with their phones like a QR code and purchase the rice. “Rice-code” transformed a scene that people naturally want to photograph into a brand-new selling place. The project successfully attracted 251,320 visitors, about 30 times the population of the village, and sales jumped dramatically. Also, the homepage access of the village increased 8 times more than in usual times. “Rice-code” met both consumer and client needs, recognizing that rice was too heavy for the visitors to bring back home for a souvenir, but that the village also wanted to sell rice to revitalize the village. This whole movement even moved the government to build a special train station for the visitors. Ground, man’s most primitive outdoor media, became the newest. *cultural context details ・Japan's main food is rice, and more than half of cultivated field in Japan is rice-filled, although consumption of rice is declining year by year. Moreover, rice-producing districts are struggling with an aging and declining population. ・The Japanese consumer uses QR-code daily for coupons or advertising campaigns, etc., so the QR-code is a familiar technology for them.