Takashi Iba is a Professor at Faculty of Policy Management as well as the Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University. He received a Ph.D. in Media and Governance from Keio University. He is a board member of The Hillside Group, which promotes the use of patterns and pattern languages and also sponsors several conferences and publications on pattern languages. He is also the president of CreativeShift Lab Inc., which provides goods to utilise pattern languages and services to support creating new pattern languages. He was a Visiting scholar at the MIT Centre for Collective Intelligence in 2009–2010 and is a Courtesy Research Associate at the Portland Urban Architecture Research Laboratory (PUARL), School of Architecture & Environment, College of Design, College of Design, University of Oregon, in 2018–2019. Dr Iba explores the art and science of creation, covering creativity of individuals, teams, organisations, society and nature toward the Creative Society, where people could create their own goods, tools, concepts, knowledge, mechanisms and ultimately, the future with their own hands. He tackles the problem with the combinational approach of systems theory, philosophy and design practices. Dr Iba has created many pattern languages concerning creative human actions in collaboration with his students, such as Learning Patterns (2014); Presentation Patterns (2014), which received the Good Design Award; Collaboration Patterns (2014); Words for a Journey (2015), which received Good Design Award and Grand Prix of the Dementia Friendly Award by Orange Act, and Project Design Patterns (2019), as well as academic books in Japanese, including the bestselling Introduction to Complex Systems (1998). His books have been translated into Chinese, Korean and German.