he 2025 World Expo is happening now in Osaka, Japan, launching on 13 April and continuing through 13 October. This year’s convening follows the theme, “Designing Future Society for Our Lives,” and should welcome around 28 million visitors who will all be able to contribute their thoughts and experiences to help imagine a better global future. This year’s theme is in keeping with previous and future themes, with the most recent 2020 World Expo—actually hosted in late 2021 after the Covid pandemic forced delays—in Dubai focusing on Connecting Minds, Creating the Future.” The next World Expo will occur in 2030 in Saudi Arabia with “The Era of Change: Together for a Foresighted Tomorrow.” The 2025 World Expo intends to center its discussion for a future around sustainability, community, and how humanity can create happiness amidst rapid technological improvement.
A deeper look
The various exhibitions at the World Expo will give perspectives on this theme, highlighting commonalities and differences between and among cultures in a way that fosters both understanding and a sense of shared future purpose. Take, for instance, media artist Yoichi Ochiai and architect Keisuke Ochiai’s exhibit: null2. This particular exhibit is featured at one of this year’s Signature Pavillions, themed “Forging Lives,” reflecting its creators’ desire to address the alienation we, as humans, experience from the world around us with increasingly technocentric lifestyles. They seek to do so by creating new ways for us to experience our environment and other people, digitally. When visitors enter the exhibit, they will encounter a digital version of themselves that is free to move naturally around the exhibit's digital playground. This digital playground introduces the concepts of “liminal yearning” between the tangible and intangible as technology and humanity coexist in this unique space that will adapt itself to each new visitor. The exhibition also serves to help visitors come to terms with their humanity, whether their digital counterparts encounter infinite mirror optical illusions or swim together in unison with the other visitor avatars.
These avatars are created through digital human ID infrastructure, developed through AI and blockchain technology. Visitors interact with their avatars, which operate autonomously within the exhibit.Thus, null2 situates itself at the center point of debates around key challenges of our Intelligent Age. As the Intelligent Age marks the rapid advancement of exponential technologies and technology’s intersection with humanity, null2 challenges the boundaries between the two. In addition to prompting a more philosophical contemplation on what defines humanity—in cooperation with and without technology—the exhibit shapes a vision of how the future might look when identities have an as–real existence in the digital space as our physical one.
The World Expo’s Futurism
Since its inception, the World Expo has been focused on visions of the future and imagining the future we want. Showcasing a variety of innovations from around the world, the World Expo today conveys a sense of optimism and possibility for the future, a refreshing approach to how we look at today’s challenges. The 2025 World Expo is leaning especially hard into this futurism—no surprise given how much technological innovations are promising to change our lives, how rapidly and how dramatically, in the very near future. Many of the expo’s exhibits this year address questions about how society will be impacted by the innovations in the near term and decades away—from an exploration into how tech will influence humanity’s evolution over the next fifty years to envisioning flying cars to the interface of tech, eating culture, and food security.
Other exhibits focus on understanding humanity and how we can ensure a promising future through global cooperation and technology. For instance, the UN’s exhibit includes rotating discussion topics around sustainability, peace, and climate action. Similarly, Cartier is sponsoring the Women’s Pavillion exhibit that will center discussions of the future around empowering women for an equitable future. Meanwhile, the Dynamic Equilibrium of Life exhibit emphasizes how divided humanity has become and aims to help visitors better understand the “meaning of life.”
The World Expo, at its core, is a showcase of future technologies with ideals of unity, inclusive development, and a better future for humanity as a whole. There are arguments to be made, and critics make them, that with technology so easy to learn about on the internet and with climate change making mass air travel less desirable, the World Expo has outlived its time. Others suggest that with all the conflict and tension in the world today, the World Expo’s themes are outdated. Regardless, humanity by its nature is fascinated by possibility and technology is full of possibility—and the themes of the World Expo remain timeless and important to people across cultures, making it an important and productive part of our global tapestry of cultural diplomacy for decades.
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Making sense of the World Expo
Osaka, Japan, the host city of World Expo 2025. Photo by Ramon Kagie on Unsplash
April 15, 2025
The World Expo kicked off in Osaka Japan on April 13. Diplomatic Courier staff writer Stephanie Gull explores what the World Expo means to cultural diplomacy, and what visitors can expect if they visit.
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he 2025 World Expo is happening now in Osaka, Japan, launching on 13 April and continuing through 13 October. This year’s convening follows the theme, “Designing Future Society for Our Lives,” and should welcome around 28 million visitors who will all be able to contribute their thoughts and experiences to help imagine a better global future. This year’s theme is in keeping with previous and future themes, with the most recent 2020 World Expo—actually hosted in late 2021 after the Covid pandemic forced delays—in Dubai focusing on Connecting Minds, Creating the Future.” The next World Expo will occur in 2030 in Saudi Arabia with “The Era of Change: Together for a Foresighted Tomorrow.” The 2025 World Expo intends to center its discussion for a future around sustainability, community, and how humanity can create happiness amidst rapid technological improvement.
A deeper look
The various exhibitions at the World Expo will give perspectives on this theme, highlighting commonalities and differences between and among cultures in a way that fosters both understanding and a sense of shared future purpose. Take, for instance, media artist Yoichi Ochiai and architect Keisuke Ochiai’s exhibit: null2. This particular exhibit is featured at one of this year’s Signature Pavillions, themed “Forging Lives,” reflecting its creators’ desire to address the alienation we, as humans, experience from the world around us with increasingly technocentric lifestyles. They seek to do so by creating new ways for us to experience our environment and other people, digitally. When visitors enter the exhibit, they will encounter a digital version of themselves that is free to move naturally around the exhibit's digital playground. This digital playground introduces the concepts of “liminal yearning” between the tangible and intangible as technology and humanity coexist in this unique space that will adapt itself to each new visitor. The exhibition also serves to help visitors come to terms with their humanity, whether their digital counterparts encounter infinite mirror optical illusions or swim together in unison with the other visitor avatars.
These avatars are created through digital human ID infrastructure, developed through AI and blockchain technology. Visitors interact with their avatars, which operate autonomously within the exhibit.Thus, null2 situates itself at the center point of debates around key challenges of our Intelligent Age. As the Intelligent Age marks the rapid advancement of exponential technologies and technology’s intersection with humanity, null2 challenges the boundaries between the two. In addition to prompting a more philosophical contemplation on what defines humanity—in cooperation with and without technology—the exhibit shapes a vision of how the future might look when identities have an as–real existence in the digital space as our physical one.
The World Expo’s Futurism
Since its inception, the World Expo has been focused on visions of the future and imagining the future we want. Showcasing a variety of innovations from around the world, the World Expo today conveys a sense of optimism and possibility for the future, a refreshing approach to how we look at today’s challenges. The 2025 World Expo is leaning especially hard into this futurism—no surprise given how much technological innovations are promising to change our lives, how rapidly and how dramatically, in the very near future. Many of the expo’s exhibits this year address questions about how society will be impacted by the innovations in the near term and decades away—from an exploration into how tech will influence humanity’s evolution over the next fifty years to envisioning flying cars to the interface of tech, eating culture, and food security.
Other exhibits focus on understanding humanity and how we can ensure a promising future through global cooperation and technology. For instance, the UN’s exhibit includes rotating discussion topics around sustainability, peace, and climate action. Similarly, Cartier is sponsoring the Women’s Pavillion exhibit that will center discussions of the future around empowering women for an equitable future. Meanwhile, the Dynamic Equilibrium of Life exhibit emphasizes how divided humanity has become and aims to help visitors better understand the “meaning of life.”
The World Expo, at its core, is a showcase of future technologies with ideals of unity, inclusive development, and a better future for humanity as a whole. There are arguments to be made, and critics make them, that with technology so easy to learn about on the internet and with climate change making mass air travel less desirable, the World Expo has outlived its time. Others suggest that with all the conflict and tension in the world today, the World Expo’s themes are outdated. Regardless, humanity by its nature is fascinated by possibility and technology is full of possibility—and the themes of the World Expo remain timeless and important to people across cultures, making it an important and productive part of our global tapestry of cultural diplomacy for decades.
