Naomasa Nakajima

Naomasa Nakajima was born in 1941 and graduated in mechanical engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1964. He stayed on for graduate work in the laboratory of Shigeru Watanabe, the professor who brought computing into the engineering faculty and who became the patron of the Computer Technique Group. His doctoral research, completed in 1969, was on forming press dies from bundles of wire, a project that also produced the wire-bundle forms Watanabe liked to call sculpture.

In 1968 Watanabe set him a side challenge. CTG had shown that a computer could draw, but only in black. Nakajima rebuilt the laboratory's CalComp plotter to carry felt-tip pens in ten colors and wrote two routines, one drawing families of parabolas and one drawing ruled meshes, to fill shapes traced by hand into coordinates. The dragonfly wings on the October 1968 cover of Kagaku Asahi were made this way, run on an IBM machine at the company's Tokyo data center, and a full-figure courtesan after an ukiyo-e print followed by the same method. He presented the work to the Information Processing Society of Japan in January 1969 as "Computer-Made Color Pictures." He also designed the cover of Watanabe's Mathematics for the Computer Age (1968) and produced a work called Self-Locating Type discussed in the Asahi press in the spring of 1968. His lab juniors Haruki Tsuchiya, Kōji Fujino and Fujio Niwa were all CTG members, and the laboratory's later "Computer Based Art" activity brought them together with Hiroshi Kawano.

Nakajima then left art behind for a long career in design engineering. He joined the University of Tokyo faculty as a lecturer in 1969, spent a year at MIT in the early 1980s, and became a full professor in 1983. He was the founding director of the university's Research into Artifacts, Center for Engineering (RACE) from 1992 to 1997 and Dean of Engineering from 1998 to 2000, becoming emeritus in 2001. He then taught at the Open University of Japan and later served as principal of Kaiyo Academy, a boarding school in Aichi, until 2021. The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers made him an honorary member in 2006.