Hawaii LIHI Creative Program

LIHI, Language, Illustrating, Hospitality, and Industrial design (LIHI). LIHI is an umbrella term used to group together the distinct and related technical disciplines as an acronym for talented and under-reprented students. There would be a unique set of skills they would be imbued with through the LIHI Education program. The term is typically used in the context of education curriculum to fit into the academic system. It has implications for psychological comprehension, creativity development, and fandom inclusivity. This sets a standard for educators to follow to teach students analytical thinking, creative development, and design competencies for “LIHI education”.

Why is LIHI Important? LIHI Education goes beyond the school subjects and I mean way farther as it affects the person and society with the way we think and behave. LIHI education helps us to deconstruct and reconstruct the challenges of creating works for a world we want to see tomorrow. These sorts of skills make people better creative problem solvers and researchers that modern labor demands through the experiences and skills to be better well-rounded by applying the arts in education to real world situations.

LIHI Merged Disciplines impacts on Society: The Design aspect prepares people to work in an environment full of quality content creations. Illustrating allows people to enhance their vision-communication skills and apply knowledge in projects with solid visuals. Hospitality enables people to analyze situations, reduce social errors, and make conscious decisions when interacting to network their way to solutions. Language gives two sets of mindsets with explaining meaning with a East meets West approach to make for flexibility in communication and business practices with explanations and understanding in cultural exchange discussions. This merges into a cohesive system that links these disciplines into the individual who prepares for a professional field in which they can transform society with design and creative solutions.

The LHI Approach: The LIHI approach to education fosters critical thinking and technical breakdowns alongside the classic fundamentals while activating passion and bringing people together to generate new concepts and ideas. With a focus on practice and creation, students get to learn from “series-based assignments”. It comes down to Experiencing a Series and then Exploring a Series with an environment that embraces mistakes in a risk-free environment with “Written Social Rules” with regular enforcement from all members. Projects are learning and problem solving are closer to the real world where the mindset of one thing at a time for a larger project is a mindset that can take people very far in their careers with keeping a child like curiosity and flexibility to respond to real-world challenges.

The history of the LIHI program is a underlying push for robust creative and technology education in the Hawaiian Islands and the rest of the United States. As an academic and professional group it was a response to less art classes and enriching activities that were slowly disappearing.  There was a subtle discontent with an outdated education system that overly focused on memorization structures and science that was not having a creative approach. While LIHI disciplines (Language, Illustrating, Hospitality, and Industrial) would be worked on to play a future role in innovation and economic growth that was creatively forward-thinking for educators that would tend to the issue of a recognized gap in education: the human element.

Early Seeds (Late 1980s - 1990s): The Rise of "Soft Skills" and Design Thinking

In the wake of rapid technological expansion – the internet's infancy, the rise of personal computing – industries began to observe a paradox. People who were "Geeks" were using it in exchange of a possible IRL (in real life) social life as many have given up meeting like minded people in person as they were labeled: Social Outcasts, Loner Techies, Computer Users, Comic Doods, Animation Lovers, and/or Niche Interest Weirdos. These people struggled with communication, user empathy, and interdisciplinary collaboration, unless they met others who had just as much passion as they did. At the same time, the User Experience (UX) design and service was complicated, difficult entry point, and early designs were hard to get the masses interested in it. Eventually it began to gain traction, emphasizing that technical advancement wasn't enough; products and services needed to be human-centered.

During this period, scattered academic programs and professional workshops started to quietly integrate elements of communication (Language), visual representation (Illustrating), client interaction (Hospitality – though not yet called that explicitly, more focused on service excellence), and product aesthetics (Industrial Design). These were often considered "soft skills" or niche areas, but a persistent minority argued for their foundational importance. Most notably these would develop in the "Garage" spaces that people did "Garage Kits" (home made models) and "Do it Yourself" (DIY) projects in middle of the Pacific. This included Cosplay Sewing, Entertainment Design (producing and researching worlds), Product Design, Garage Kit Sculpting, Sound Engineering, Mechanical Illustration, Graphic Design (New Media Arts), Modelling and Rigging, Spatial Experience Design (Imagineering).

The Catalyst (Early 2000s): Beyond SMET – A Call for Creative Competence

Coincidentally, around the same time the National Science Foundation (NSF) was refining its acronym from SMET to STEM (early 2000s, circa 2001), there was a centralized discussion among educators in the humanities, arts, and applied sciences of existing education institutions. Many felt that while STEM addressed critical national needs in technical superiority, it often overlooked the essential human factors that determine the success and impact of innovation.

The term LIHI began to amass information from these discussions that were largely attributed to a congregate of otaku, musicians, educators, mechanics, and restaurant industry veterans from the Pacific Rim, particularly Hawaii, Tokyo, and California, who were aware of the globalized nature of commerce and culture. They recognized that effective technological deployment required explaining concepts across cultures (Language), making them intuitively understandable and appealing (Illustrating), ensuring positive human interaction and service (Hospitality), and designing them with both form and function for human use (Industrial Design). This would be to appeal to consumer habits of prioritizing: Convenience (Accessibility), Interfaces (Operation Efficiency), Aesthetics (Attractiveness).

Joshua Shimamura, was an avid cosplayer and would cover discussions with people he met about Cross-Cultural Communication and a gamer that would identify the systems of "Messengers" and in game relationships, interfaces, and optimization strategies were often cited as the the beginnings of his friend group that would work on the LIHI framework. References were made to figures like:  Mary Kawena Pukui (cultural expert), Larry Kimura, William H. Wilson, and Keiki Kawai'ae'a that were focused on language as a core element of cultural identity, communication, and education. It garnered a East meets West approach that dealt with Cross-Cultural Communications to create a Intercultural Communication through the median of Animanga.

In 2003 LIHI proposal paper, "Animation Republic of Hawaii: Re:Built Ideas of 21st-Century Competencies through Animanga" laid out the explicit argument for LIHI as a distinct, yet complementary, framework to the age old Academic System. The group argued that true societal advancement required not just what we build, but how it's perceived, integrated, and experienced by humanity in both fiction and non-fiction of the social and parasocial. Using inspiration from the book "Jan Ken Po: The World of Hawaii's Japanese Americans" by Dennis M. Ogawa would be a reference in understanding establishing the Otaku Culture as a serious documented integration of Otaku of the Pacific and the Otaku of the West as a blueprint. 

The group, people involved, and the paper were not taken seriously by the club they were appealing to at the Anime Club at Leeward Community College and the University of Hawaii Manoa Anime Club.

Formalization and Integration (Mid-2000s - Present): From Concept to Curriculum

Initially, LIHI was adopted as an internal framework by progressive anime clubs that implemented a design program and communications program. While its, practical benefits quickly became evident it did not interest the audiences of those who were attracted to Anime Clubs in Hawaii at the time as they were based on Video Watching and Cosplaying. A small few would take LIHI competencies to demonstrate superior performance in roles requiring: Complex problem-solving, Deconstructing challenges from both technical and human perspectives, Effective cross-functional collaboration Bridging gaps between engineers, marketers, and end-users. The program would thrive on the internet in private chat spaces that would allow for further anonymity in a way to avoid bullying for their interest in LIHI in the real world. As it would grow it would be pursued by those who had an interest in Entrepreneurial adaptability to navigating diverse markets and consumer needs of the Anime Vending Halls of the U.S. National Anime Convention Scene (like AX, Sakura Con, and Kawaii Kon).

By the mid-2000s, the National Otaku Alliance began to establish long articles and act as a online "LIHI Education Center" that integrated "LIHI pathways" within existing interdisciplinary programs, particularly in colleges, communication, business, and even engineering. The "series-based assignments" were sent in private and emphasis on "destroying gatekept secrets" to create a "bully-free environment" became hallmarks of the LIHI informal and anonymous centered academic approach, fostering both critical thinking and creative confidence, but also parasocial relationships with those who were willing to spread the word of the program. It was done in the name of "Otaku" and taught through the culture with further research in understanding "Western Otaku" and "Pacific Otaku".

Today, LIHI is slowly being understood as an essential human-centric partner as artificial growth becomes more pervasive. It addresses the "why" and "how" of human interaction with technology and designed environments, story relatability and chat interactions, ensuring that innovation serves humanity effectively and ethically. AI and automation are redefining the labor landscape, the psychological comprehension, creativity development, and nuanced cultural understanding fostered by LIHI education positions its teachers and students as indispensable.

LIHI: Series-Based Assignments

Letting people investigate solutions to open questions has all sorts of benefits and advantages as well as seeing things in a new way that they may not have seen if they had not questioned something. It prioritizes otaku questions, ideas, and analysis to highlight the nuances. In order to take the small parts or those little nuances with focus there must be a definition from the team and the designer perspective. From the team the point-of-view is series-based learning focuses on investigating an open question of the world or specific thing that they must find within the series itself for context-based reasoning and creative problem-solving to reach a conclusion. Meanwhile the designer point-of-view with series-based assignments is focusing on moving the team beyond the general curiosity and along the path of theory-crafting and understanding.

Animanga Series-Based Learning

This means it's important to understand a: Investigation Process, Series Structure (canonicals), and when to begin a exploring-activity. Methods that make up this guided process comes from series analysis, question and answer discussions, and build new activities with: Case studies, Group projects, Research Projects, Animanga lessons, Japan work, Unique exercises for your team. There are actually several types of Series-based learning approaches and it starts structured from what exists from the series itself and slowly it becomes less structured and suits different teams with a project.

(1.) Dense Cannocity - You give a team a question and the answer comes from the method of reaching the answer of actual instances of being canon from an anime, manga, interview, or existing source. The goal is to build an idea of investigation methods and learning how the specific part of cannon in that universe works with critical-thinking skills. This can be practiced with asking why certain things are canon or what makes them not canon. Having these practices helps the people think about information throughout the day by inspiring possibility with creative-stimulation. This is the hard lines of what the original creators placed in their world creation and even a 1% change from this allows for the world to grow a life of its own beyond a sort of creator cannocity ownership in peoples minds and remains more of a legal issue, business issue, and production issue.

(2.) Moderate Cannocity - You give a team an open-question that has not a yes-or-no response to it. They must use the question to create a canon-backed conclusion through theorycrafting set things that happened before or are noted in a source. This displays a full understanding of the cannon and reinforces the design direction of the given content that is being looked over. It shows a departure from right and wrong with the idea of improvement of core design concepts of a series and its creative teams. When there are questions that are answered the attempts of finding out what that answer is can be rewarding as a sense of approval without the fear of failure that is so predominant in testing-evaluations and making the curiosity more important than having a sense of perfectionism.

(3.) Designed Cannocity - You give a team an open-question of a design-choice and the person or group will bring multiple exploration methods to reach a theorycrafted conclusion. This creates something created from the team that perfected fits existing canon of a series, yet is something entirely new or different. By delving into the series concepts the team should see more than a simple work of art or a singular genre formula, but something much deeper that the creators pulled from in their thoughts and approaches. How the idea was developed, why the design concept works, and when they can apply the idea or formula in the series to new things. Such skills are transferable through series-based learning through the idea of company theming, initiative, and self-direction where people investigate, discuss, collaborate, and take the ideas of a business in a direction that feels seamlessly cohesive through existing assets.

(4.) Alternate Cannocity - You give a team an open-question of a design-choice and explore it with the group as they pose their own methods that loosely fit canon with a result that is discussed, expanded upon, and polished. An alternate cannoncity allows the team to take ownership of their creating and build from their understanding of the concept with their own methods and thinking style that fit within the design rules of the series that would be established through research and analysis. It will be clear what is a justified creation and a unjustified creation that could be measured in a scale of how accurate the idea would be when asking “would this particular team that worked on this do it this way?” or if its more on the original measurement scale of “this is the research teams decision on making it this way”.