2020年7月8日、College Creative Jam開幕を告げるキックオフがオンラインにて開催されました。
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Education Evangelist: Creative confidence is a growth strategy
How I got here
Adobe's EDU enterprise team in Japan had strong relationships with IT managers and school principals — good conversations about license seat counts and renewals. What nobody had was a relationship with the people actually deciding whether a purchased license got used: the professors. Licenses sat idle in classrooms while awkward renewal conversations happened without any evidence students were touching the tools at all.
I was hired to close that gap. As an Education Evangelist, Strategic Development Manager — a role that sat inside Adobe's sales org — my responsibility was to evangelize Adobe XD and overall Creative Cloud adoption in classrooms, growing the active user base. I didn't carry a personal quota, but my compensation was tied to the sales team's overall performance, because as Adobe's product evangelist, I needed to think about the business too.
With my design problem-solving skills, I closed the gap the only way I knew how: find out what someone's actually struggling with, then build the thing that fixes it.
Strategy
Is Adobe only for creative pros?
The fundamental problem was a misconception: non-design institutions believed Adobe was a tool for art students becoming professional designers — overkill for anyone else. Polytechnic schools and general education faculties looked at Creative Cloud and assumed it wasn't built for their students. That belief, not a lack of time or interest, was what kept adoption locked inside design departments.
My way in was craft, not a pitch. I used my own background in XD and UI/UX as the credibility to approach professors directly — not to sell Adobe, but to offer something concrete: co-develop a curriculum, guest-teach a workshop, run a seminar.
Using Adobe XD as a gateway tool for the Adobe ecosystem
Adobe XD did double duty here. Its logic — user flows, prototyping, structured problem-solving — was legible to non-design students as much as design students, which let me evangelize the same tool across entirely different audiences and break the "Adobe = art students" assumption one classroom at a time.
It was also the on-ramp into full Creative Cloud: once someone was comfortable with XD, the rest of CC stopped feeling unfamiliar. The tool was never the end goal — full adoption, and a broader idea of who creativity was for, was.
Anyone can be a creative problem solver
The underlying premise: creative problem-solving, not tool proficiency, is what will matter most for students' careers as automation reshapes what "employable" means.
I worked that on two tracks. Exposure first — real industry examples in front of students, not abstract arguments. Enablement second — self-serve resources instead of gatekeeping through me, and student ambassadors running workshops themselves rather than centralizing every session on me. Same instinct that later shaped CCJ 2021's shift to selected students running XD demos / workshops: enablement scales, and I don't.
Schools were competing, so I made noise
One more factor drove the volume of content I produced: Japan's shrinking student population means schools compete hard on standardized rankings (偏差値), watching each other closely for anything that sets them apart. A documented partnership with a global brand was exactly that kind of edge. So I treated PR as part of the strategy, not an afterthought — every published seminar or workshop became something a rival school's faculty would want for themselves too.
Below are a few of the projects that came out of this strategy.
Outcome 1: College Creative Jam 2020
- Status
- Shipped
- Timeframe
- July, 2020
- Role
- Program Lead
- Company
- Adobe
- Link
- Event site
Adapted Adobe's established US College Creative Jam for Japan—a multi-week student design competition where university teams take a real creative brief from a real organization, build mobile prototypes in Adobe XD, and present their work to industry professionals. Japan had no local version. I led the translation and localization of the entire program, and connected Adobe's US team, Japanese campuses, and The Ocean Agency as brief partner. Patagonia Japan joined as a judging partner — the start of a relationship that set up everything that came next.
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What year one taught me
The event went well, but I noticed a learning-culture gap. Japanese students and professors responded better to sustained, hands-on guidance through a real design process than to the quicker, one-off format the US version was built around — Adobe staff teaching a tool in a single session. That observation became the redesign brief for 2021.
Outcome 2: College Creative Jam 2021
- Status
- Shipped
- Timeframe
- July, 2021
- Role
- Program Lead
- Company
- Adobe
Instead of repeating the 2020 format, I rebuilt the program around that gap. Patagonia Japan moved from judge to brief partner, with a challenge centered on growing regenerative-agriculture organic farming in Japan. I owned partner, school, and PR relationships end to end. Key decisions defined the redesign:
- Replaced single-instructor XD training (Adobe-led, one person, one session) with a phase-based curriculum — Discovery, Research, Strategy, Build — each taught by an outside industry professional, so students learned a real design process, not just a tool
- Selected students across schools and trained them to run Adobe XD demos / workshops so tool learning didn't depend on Adobe staff — seeding enablement on each campus rather than keeping expertise concentrated with Adobe
- Built mid-way check-ins and design critiques into the 2021 program so students practiced iterative design as they went — not only a polished final prototype at the end
- Strategically recorded every session, then upcycled the content after the event as free learning material, pitch assets, and outreach for universities that couldn't join live — so one program kept opening new faculty relationships
Impact
- 168 students, 23 universities, 35 professors, 54 industry professionals
- 8 published articles
- Japan EDU Adobe XD MAU reached 14.0K the month after the program ended, up 24% year over year
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【イベント】College Creative Jam 2021最終審査員・講師のご紹介
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いよいよ課題発表！モバイルプロトタイプで気候変動問題に挑む〜College Creative Jam 2021 キックオフ
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【イベント】 College Creative Jam 2021 フィナーレ！リサーチに基づいたアイデアあふれる力作が並ぶ
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【イベント】College Creative Jam 2021チャンピオンインタビュー農家と農地取得希望者を結ぶ、アプリ「Norch」
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【イベント】College Creative Jam 2021 入賞者インタビュー アイデアを形にする、課題解決への取り組み方
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Outcome 3: Senshu University Curriculum Development
- Status
- Concluded
- Timeframe
- 2022
- Role
- Program Lead
- Company
- Adobe
Professor Kenichiro Miyama at Senshu University's business school saw the CCJ 2021 Patagonia partnership and reached out. I'd brought in design researcher Professor Shiro Inoue as an outside industry lecturer for CCJ 2021 — so when Miyama wanted to build something new, I was the one who could connect him to the right collaborator. I facilitated that connection and program-managed the collaboration as Miyama and Inoue built "Business Design Special Lecture," the first program in Japan to bring Adobe XD into a business/humanities curriculum rather than a design department.
Miyama and Inoue built the curriculum content itself — the JETRO Dhaka relationship and the Bangladesh fieldwork design were entirely Miyama's, from his own network. What made the program possible was the introduction and the facilitation between them, plus positioning it as a first for Adobe in Japanese academia.
Course: ran spring 2022, about 30 junior and senior year business majors, working in Adobe XD across the full thinking process — ideation, wireframing a business plan, and building the final presentation deck inside the tool itself, so the reasoning trail stayed visible.
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Outcome 4: Classroom Lectures & Workshops
- Status
- Shipped
- Timeframe
- 2020 - 2023
- Role
- Education Evangelist
- Company
- Adobe
Beyond the flagship jams, the same strategy ran through guest lectures and campus workshops — meeting professors where they already taught, and proving Adobe belonged in rooms that had never called themselves design departments.
Highlights
Waseda University (Dec 2022) — guest lecture with Professor Yasuhiro Oikawa, placed inside a required first-year course for engineering and media-expression majors — non-design students, on creativity and career
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Read moreTokyo Denki University (Mar 2022) — full-day XD workshop the university's media center initiated because they'd seen CCJ 2021 and wanted the same experience for their own students. I taught the UX/design-fundamentals portion; a TDU student who'd self-trained in XD co-taught the hands-on exercise — the train-the-trainer pattern from CCJ 2021 propagating on its own
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【イベントレポート】 Adobe XDでモバイル名刺をデザイン〜基礎から学べるワークショップを東京電機大学で開催
Read moreAPU × Adobe collaboration: Professor Selim Meylanov and UX researcher Ethan Parry, bringing design thinking into a psychology course. I understood what APU was looking for, worked with the professor to clarify his intent, connected him with Selim, and coordinated the project through to delivery — without leading the teaching myself.
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Read moreClosing
Creative confidence was never about being good at design. It's the confidence that your idea, your thinking, your vision is worth putting into the world — whether that shows up as a mobile app, a business plan, or a card design in a class that had nothing to do with art. I wanted students who'd never call themselves creative to make something with their own hands and realize they already were.
I don't hold the Evangelist title anymore. But the instinct never left — I still teach, speak, and show up for workshops from inside the PLG team, because helping someone realize they can be creative isn't a job description. It's just the part of this work I never wanted to put down.
Published Work
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