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Tokyo Neurotech Consortium (ARAYA)

Turning Science into Innovation

Turning Science into Innovation

UX Design Project

Jan 2026 - Feb 2026

Tokyo, Japan (Remote)

Overview

How do we bridge the gap from Japan's innovative neurotech ideas to the greater world? ARAYA is working on the project/movement, Tokyo Neurotech Consortium, to help bridge this gap, to be able to bring these mere ideas into reality. For this project, I created this informational website, as a start to this project. The purpose of this landing page was to educate start-ups, innovators, and also investors. In my solution,

Preview Website

Preview Website

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The Problem

Untapped Potential & Failed Models. ARAYA sees that Japan has world-class neuroscience, but the Japanese ecosystem is disconnected. Existing models are failing to create an industry.

Start-ups

Japan is a leader in science and materials but tend to be stuck in academic labs. Existing companies face high hurdles in navigating commercialization.

Investors

Japan attracts investors but venture capitalists often complain about lack of startups to invest in due to risk averse nature.

Global Disconnect

The clinical path is a "black box" for both domestic and international companies. Japan is isolated from global capital and ecosystems.

Existing solutions effort to bridge this gap fall short due to a couple reasons. They network without any action. Many groups currently become forums for discussions, but ultimately lead to no deals, products or emerging of companies. Additionally, there a lack of tangible outputs (there's no follow up to events) and they are not actively connecting the full ecosystems (startups, venture capitalists, policies, and new talents).

ARAYA's Solution

"Make Japan an undisputed neurotech innovation and capital hub"

Their mission "Neurotech Consortium 2030" has 3 core values:


  1. Build a Startup Factory

  2. Facilitate Strategic Investment

  3. Become the "Global Gateway"


These core values focus on building and supporting new startups through structured mentorship and expert guidance, connecting vetted companies with trusted venture capitalists to enable strategic investment, and serving as a central partner for global businesses entering Japan as well as Japanese companies expanding internationally.

Design Inspiration

Inspo Designs

Inspo Designs

Tranparency

Tranparency

One priority when designing for this website was transparency + informational. The goal of this website was to introduce this new project of ARAYA and to inform and spread their mission and their purpose. With that in mind, it was clear what the content of the website was going to be.

MInimal + Suspense

MInimal + Suspense

Another value when designing this website was keeping the website minimal and exciting. We wanted to keep this minimal as the documentation and other handoffs didn't include a ton of content. We didn't want to fill this website with misinformation so we wanted to keep everything simple. On top of that, since they wanted a "get in the waitlist" feature for users to sign up for future events (that weren't yet fully planed), we wanted the design to be exciting, like something big was coming (as it is coming).

Final Design

The final design succeeded to be, transparent, informational, minimal, and also bilingual. Tokyo Neurotech Consortium, based in Tokyo Japan, it is important to have Japanese first while having English as well. This allows for a much wider audience to be able to feel the impact from this movement. From various feedback sessions from ARAYA team member, the final design includes neuroscience related components such as the brain and neural links (to represent connections and bridging gaps) as well as stars to represent that the sky is the limit and that there's a much greater future in the world of neuroscience.

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Reflection

This was a super cool experience for me to be able to design for an international company. Being one of the first produced content of the Tokyo Neurotech Consortium, I was constantly facing a lack of content to build the website while also dealing with the fear of adding misinformation or wrong information. Throughout this project, I spent a lot of time research more about neuroscience and neurotech to try to find what designs I may be able to incorporate but falling short constantly. It was until I consulted ARAYA team members that I felt confident with this design moving forward.

I am also proud of the unique design that this website is composited of. I personally haven't designed a website for two languages at once, but am super proud of the turn out. Currently this website is being used at events to get people in their waitlist. Through this project, I've learned more about designing for communities outside of the United States as their design norms are different. Additionally designing for Neurotech was a great learning opportunity as it's not a field I am most familiar with, but learned a lot via research and talking to peers.


Huge thanks to Hannah Kodama-Douglas at ARAYA for appointing me to this project as well as guiding me through to ensure that the design aligns with what ARAYA wants. Looking forward to see how Tokyo Neurotech Consortium is going to grow in the future!