Chiba Tech's Henkaku Center Establishes "Radical Transformation Award" - Sound Artist Christine Sun Kim Selected as Inaugural Winner

The Henkaku Center at Chiba Tech is honored to announce that sound artist and performer Christine Sun Kim has been awarded the first-ever Radical Transformation Award (変革賞) at the 2025 Symposium on Design and Science! 

The Radical Transformation Award includes a 10 million yen prize, generously funded by Reid Hoffman, Honorary Doctor of Chiba Institute of Technology. It recognizes changemakers across all disciplines who advance human flourishing through masterful interventions at critical leverage points.

 

 

About Radical Transformation Award (変革賞): 

"Celebrating those who transform the world through radical yet elegant disruption."

Presented by the Henkaku Center at Chiba Tech, the Radical Transformation Award celebrates those who have brought about a positive societal shift (変革) through radical and elegant action. We honor individuals, teams, or initiatives that challenge authority and push us in initially uncomfortable directions, which, in retrospect, are clearly the right direction for our values and aesthetics.

The Radical Transformation Award includes a 10 million yen prize, generously funded by Reid Hoffman. It recognizes changemakers across all disciplines who advance human flourishing through masterful interventions at critical leverage points.

2025 Winner - Christine Sun Kim

For the inaugural Radical Transformation Award at the 2025 Symposium on Design and Science (SDS), we honor sound artist and performer Christine Sun Kim for fundamentally reimagining how society understands sound, language, and power. Her work challenges dominant modes of communication through art and activism.

Through musical notation, American Sign Language (ASL), infographics, and humor, Christine creates new interfaces for understanding that expand Disability identity, using it as an advantage while welcoming the audience to join a new kind of design dialogue. She does not merely critique how oral and auditory norms marginalize Deaf communities, but constructs alternative systems. 

Her work exemplifies elegant disruption by challenging assumptions about communication, access, and belonging. Through drawing, performance, video, and large-scale murals, she generates cultural resonance that transcends disciplines and borders, and inspires new ways of thinking about language.

By bridging art and activism, linguistics and technology, personal narrative and systemic critique, Christine embodies what we seek to celebrate with this award.