A Look at the “In-Between” of Making: Featured Projects 2026

We see new products and services every day, but we rarely get the chance to know what happened before they came to life. What people were thinking, where they hesitated, who they spoke to, and what they tried along the way is this is the inspiration that Featured Projects 2026 chose to explore.

Now in its third edition, the event centred on the theme “The ‘In-Between’ Where Things Are Born”, focusing on the creative processes that take place before something reaches its final form. Visitors could explore the ideas, experiments, and trial and error behind the creation of everything from graphics and products to music.

Speaking with Sagara, one of the event’s organisers, revealed that this year’s theme had become something of a blueprint for the entire festival. From the website and original typeface to the graphics, exhibitions, and conversations taking place at the venue, the idea of looking at what happens before something is complete had been built into the event in unexpected ways.

Featured Projects is guided by the belief that “Good making opens up tomorrow.”

When asked what “good making” means, Sagara, co-representative of Featured Projects, explains:

“Something that opens up a new perspective for yourself or someone else because you made it. It doesn’t necessarily have to bring about a major change. Even something small can be something that ‘opens up tomorrow.’”

Each year, Featured Projects chooses a theme based on something the team wants to think about at that particular moment. In 2023, it was “Good making opens up tomorrow.” In 2024, at a time when anyone can become a maker, the festival returned to the starting point with “Starting from ‘Sōzō’”, asking why and what we create. Now in 2026, the theme is “The ‘In-Between’ Where Things Are Born.”

Behind this year’s theme is a changing creative landscape.

With technologies such as AI, it has become increasingly normal to input something and receive an output, allowing us to reach a finished result faster than before. At the same time, there are fewer opportunities to encounter the processes and trial and error that happen along the way. This year, Featured Projects chose to focus on the overlapping layers of people, technology, and thought that exist before something reaches its final form.

“I benefit from these technologies every day too, and I enjoy being able to write programs in my own language. At the same time, I felt a certain discomfort with not knowing what was happening in the ‘in-between’ between input and output,” says Sagara.

They say that finding it interesting to read through AI-generated code and gradually understand parts they could not have written themselves also became one of the starting points for this year’s theme.

For Featured Projects, an annual theme is not an answer intended to make a definitive statement.

“This is how we feel, but what does everyone else think?”

It is more like a question to explore together with the people who gather at the event.

What makes the theme interesting is that it is not limited to the programmes taking place during the event.

The official Featured Projects 2026 website includes a feature called “Gyotaku”.

Websites are usually presented in their finished state. Here, however, visitors can trace back through the process of the website and festival gradually taking shape. Rather than showing only the completed result, the site makes the preparation and trial and error part of the experience.

The event’s main visual also reflects the idea of the “in-between”.

Its motifs are a plant stand holding a plant and concrete blocks whose colour changes when they become wet. Each time water is added, the appearance of the lettering and the marks left behind change, with each state gradually accumulating. Rather than fixing the work in a single finished form, the process of change itself becomes part of what is shown.

The typography used throughout the venue also reflects the thinking behind Featured Projects.

Created specifically for Featured Projects 2026, the original Latin typeface “FP MONO” was developed through a connection with Portuguese type foundry R-TYPOGRAPHY. It was designed from the beginning to sit naturally alongside Japanese text.

FP MONO takes its starting point from the square grid shared by kanji, hiragana, and katakana. The width, height, and other proportions of the Latin characters were designed around this structure, allowing different writing systems to sit naturally within the same layout.

Japanese and Latin characters are brought together within a shared structure rather than forcing one system to adapt to the other. This way of working also echoes Featured Projects itself, where makers from different fields, including design, art, companies, and independent creators, come together in one space.

The official website also allows visitors to experiment with FP MONO themselves, adjusting the width and weight of the characters and seeing how their forms change.

Once we entered THE CAMPUS, another kind of “in-between” began to emerge.

Booths from different fields, including design, art, and craft, filled the venue as visitors moved between them.

Gentle music played throughout the space, and despite the number of people gathered, there was no sense of rush. The concrete and metal architecture of THE CAMPUS was complemented by wooden materials, vivid colours, and bold typography, with booths offering different worlds of their own lined up throughout the venue.

At Creators Market, one of the defining features was not simply being able to buy something, but being able to speak directly with the person who made it. Visitors could be seen picking up works, asking how they were used, and hearing about the stories behind their creation. Finding something that caught their attention and then hearing directly from its maker shifted their interest from “what was made” to “why and how it was made.”

Talk Session continued that conversation. In “The ‘In-Between’ of Makers: Creators Market Roundtable”, market participants talked about what sparked their ideas, their everyday creative processes, and the ways they think about sharing their work. What visitors had first encountered through the booths could now be explored through conversation.

Table Talk brought people even closer. Around 15 participants gathered around each guest, sharing tea while discussing a common theme. Visitors were not simply there to listen. They heard about the process of trial and error, handled the actual products, and exchanged ideas with the people who made them.

There is also an “in-between” between the person who makes something and the person who sees it. Through conversation, that distance gradually becomes smaller.

The newly introduced Live Performance programme took this idea even further. Through live creation, VJ performances, DJ sets, and more, the programme was designed not simply to show completed expressions, but to let visitors experience the time in which an expression takes shape.

The Exhibition brought together works that marked turning points in creators’ careers, panels tracing the origins and development of different services, and works created as new experiments. In “UN/KNOWN” by Suntory Design Center, visitors’ photographs were analysed by AI, which generated graphics based on the emotions detected in them. The installation allowed visitors to experience a process similar to the one the team uses in product development, where they repeatedly reconsider their designs while imagining emotions that even the person themselves may not be aware of.

See something that has already been completed. Ask the person who made it. Look into the thinking behind it. Try making something yourself. Witness something being created in the moment. The event offered multiple ways to gradually move closer to the process behind a finished work.

Sagara describes good making as something that “opens up a new perspective.” By learning about the people, technologies, ideas, and conversations behind a finished work, visitors can begin to see things that were previously hidden from view. The things they encounter through that process may also become things they develop a longer and deeper relationship with.

The theme “The ‘In-Between’ Where Things Are Born” became something to experience throughout the entire event.