Kevin Yamada, Managing Partner and Strategic Designer, BIOTOPE
By Tad Vezner
March 11, 2026
Kevin Yamada (MDes 2022) left a lucrative job at the largest general trading conglomerate in Japan to become a designer because he wanted help companies better serve their end users.
After being hit by a car at the age of seven, Kevin Yamada lost his leg below the knee.
Continuous trips between the hospital and home forced Yamada to grow up in a different environment than his friends. He yearned to not only express himself, but “I wanted to express that I was 100 percent OK,” Yamada says.
Within six months, he was able to run. He embraced the sport and ran track and field for his high school in the small city of Isehara, Japan. In 2004, before graduating, he became Japan’s national high school record holder for the 100-meter dash in the T44 category, created for para-athletes with lower limb impairments. His time was 12.64 seconds.
All that might help explain why Yamada, as a young man in his 20s, left a lucrative job at the largest general trading conglomerate in Japan to become a designer.
Getting to Know the Humans
Yes, he had been a project manager for Mitsui & Co.’s giant Indonesian power station and had managed business development for the entire Oceania region, but “I did not know much about the users there, the residents living there. We designed the equipment and sold to them, but I did not know about the users. It was so strange for me.”
Yamada wanted end-point users to be able to express themselves—he wanted to know the humans he was serving, so he and his company could serve them better.
After quitting his job and taking his five-year-old son to Chicago as he pursued a degree from the Institute of Design, Yamada got a job at BIOTOPE, a Tokyo-based strategic design firm. It seemed like a natural fit: a book by the company’s founder, Kunitake Saso (MDM 2013), had inspired him to pursue design in the first place.
Now, as the company’s managing partner and strategic designer—one who grew up within Japan’s extremely results-oriented business culture—Yamada feels a bit like a missionary bridging two worlds.
On the one hand, designers—of which there are not many in Japan, Yamada says—need to be more conscious of their clients’ immediate financial returns.
A #1 Bestseller—and a Bigger Vision
But on the other hand, large Japanese corporations often suffer from what Yamada calls “slow culture…where they become big corporations but cannot make big innovations. They become so big, they forget about the missions they should pursue.”
Yamada recently wrote and released his own nonfiction book, Design the System, Move the Whole: A Strategic Designer’s Practical Wisdom Beyond Partial Optimization, a #1 best seller in its category on Amazon, general industrial manufacturing.
But his long-term goal is to open a systems design school in Japan, to grow what he calls “a very small community of 20 to 30 people to 1,000.”
Leading the Tokyo Shapeshift Salon Focused on Mental Health
In October 2024, Yamada and BIOTOPE founder Kunitake Saso brought ID’s Shapeshift Salon to Tokyo, co-hosting a session on mental health and wellbeing with Nikken Sekkei. The gathering brought together designers, urban planners, clinic directors, and civic leaders to examine Japan’s mental health crisis as a systems problem—one shaped by work culture, economic pressures, family structure, and deep social stigma.
Japan’s suicide rate runs nearly double the global average, and the number of people living with mental illness has more than doubled since 2002. The session moved from diagnosis to action, prototyping AI-embedded interventions that could be woven into existing systems. For Yamada, it was the kind of work that bridges his two worlds: the business acumen he built at Mitsui, and the human-centered practice he found at ID.
Kevin Yamada came to ID with deep business experience and left with the design skills to heighten that experience and distinguish him in the market and the workplace. If you’re interested in combining business acumen with systems design, learn more about our MDes, MDes + MBA, and MDes + MPA programs.