Expansion and generalization in the contemporary design environment
Without any real sense of us having entered into a new century, the current situation of Japan-politically, economically and in terms of international relations, education, health care and agriculture-is accompanied by a vast array of problems on the social and historical levels.
The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York took place on September 11 last year just as the examination process for last year's awards was getting under way. This year, we witnessed the return to Japan of the abductees from North Korea, an event which captured the interest of the whole Japanese population and forced us all to adopt a new awareness of the problems confronting us.
Faced by this barrage of international problems, the members of the adjudicatory committee set about reaching their judgments with a common awareness reached after having been called upon once again to consider the social significance of design.
The judges realized that the Good Design Awards were concerned with the selection and attestation of design as represented by "forms" that realized ideals intended to provide support for the most routine activities in everyday life, although not solely in terms of sheer physical form but also embracing all types of systemic concerns ranging over society and daily life as a whole.
The problems currently occurring over a wide range of fields are closely bound up with the world of industry and all the domains with which the G-Mark system is concerned, and the influence of these problems is having major repercussions in excess even of those we had imagined. One particularly prominent example is the drastic decrease in both the types and quantities of products being newly developed in the current economic environment. This is indicative of the fact that, in the context of corporate management strategy, there are some companies that place importance on investing in design and are convinced of its value, while there are other companies that place little or no importance on design.
But South Korea and China are rapidly closing the gap with Japan on the industrial level, and we are being made increasingly aware not only of the dynamism of these two countries' economies but also of the importance they are placing on design as a reflection of this dynamism. We can see that they are emphasizing the value of design for economic assistance to the extent that they conceive of design as a managerial resource in its own right.
Under these conditions, it has become clearer than ever before that the domains with which design is concerned are expanding dramatically to include not only the world of industry but also everything from government administration and social infrastructure to interdisciplinary research.
We can assume that design has expanded and become more generalized and universal, to the extent that we need to take account once again of the fact that the objects being submitted for examination are imbued with the definitions of design held by the individual submitters.

Creation of companies through design to contribute to the formation of a manufacturing nation
However, from the basic standpoint of Japan as a manufacturing nation, one cannot discard a sense of apprehension upon looking at the whole range of products submitted to the awards in terms of industrial design that somehow manufacturing is itself at present in an ever deeper state of disarray.
First of all, the relationship between design and the production of hardware in forms such as household electrical appliances and information-related devices shows that we have entered a period when Japanese industry has transcended the transition from industrial society to the information-oriented society not only in terms of the relationship between current Japanese production technology and the market, and when we are being called upon to re-examine the historical changes and transformations being undergone by industry. In particular, it can be proved in terms of the historical development of technology that the household electrical appliances industry is an industry that can be taken care of entirely by developing countries. It constitutes a form of technology that can no longer be supported by Japan's industrial structure.
As is clear from a close examination of the structure of domestic demand in Japan, we are witnessing a radical polarization of demand with the produce available at 100-yen shops at one end of the spectrum and high-class brands at the other end. Customer service management (CSM) at mass sales outlets connected on a chain store basis and at the shops of famous overseas brands is bringing about a thorough overhaul of everything from manufacturing to supplier chain management (SCM) on the basis of the integration of information technology in forms such as the Internet and distribution. Such revolutionary new developments have already destroyed previous production and distribution systems. The larger the size of the company, the more companies are liable to lag behind and be lacking in flexibility of response.
We need to make ourselves aware once again that it is design accomplished by companies that succeed in creating a supply system on the basis of a manufacturing style rooted in the idea of the "on-line consumer" with access to mobile phones and a corporate style in which product information is skillfully disclosed and the standard of after-sales services is enhanced that will result in the creation of new-generation industries that emerge from out of the information-oriented age.
As both a manufacturing nation and as a trading nation, Japan has entered on an era when we the selection of industrial fields needs to be undertaken with great care. In other words, we have entered a period when the relationship between manufacturing and design needs to be newly created rather than recreated. Design has an indispensable role to play in the process of new creation.

Assessment criteria newly added to the selection process
This year I asked all the adjudicators to discuss and assess three points in particular.
My first request was that they should take a close look at whether the products and the results actually submitted were imbued with a dynamic stance from the angles of the designs and the designers. The essential point here was that, in the current era when the economic environment in which manufacturing finds itself and the enthusiasm of designers themselves is only too often being trampled on, I wanted them to uncover vital forms of expression in the field of design that succeeded in getting the better of these difficulties.
The next matter is connected with the collapse in the point of departure for production itself brought about by a series of scandals affecting the agricultural and livestock industries. Specifically, what I wanted the judges to do was to take a detailed, expert look at products which prided themselves on their ecological qualities or advertised themselves as "minus-ion health goods" or on the basis of their universal design features, and assess the products on this basis. The product names and the way in which their properties are expressed might be thought of in terms of product strategy in line with an age of corporate conviction, but, in terms of design essence, they might be thought of at the same time as a betrayal of such conviction. I have no intention of denying the value of incorporating such trends of the times into product concepts, but I felt that there was something problematic about this as regards a recognition system such as "Good Design."
Finally, there is the question of whether or not the selection of materials and the scrapping system have been guaranteed as part of the design concept. For instance, materials that are indicated as giving cause for concern in the report issued by the World Health Organization dealing with the problem of environmental hormones were the subject of questions submitted to the applicants, while expert opinions were also sought from specialist organizations.
With regard to these three matters, we have clearly entered an era when product design and industrial design must be subject to assessment from a variety of new angles including ecological characteristics and their features with regard to universal design.

Virtual examinations and attendance examinations
Application on the Internet appears to have become well established, yet entering by this mode imposes its own distinctive burdens on entrants. Improvements need to be made in this regard.
As far as the judges too are concerned, each judge submits his or her preliminary judgment on the documents submitted by entrants by return to the server. The results of these preliminary assessments are then discussed by each adjudicatory team, which comes together for this purpose. The results of the preliminary assessment are thus determined. Submissions concerning which a preliminary judgment cannot be made solely on the basis of the submitted documents are considered at meetings of the team heads in order to reach a conclusion on the results of the preliminary examination.
Virtual examination of documents will to some extent reflect the subjective opinions of the individual judges. But examinations attended by all members of the adjudicatory team and discussed among the individual members results in objective judgments also being reached.
The secondary assessment involves examination of the actual submissions. In the case of architectural items, the judges go to visit the environment in which they are actually used. They then make a report which is submitted as a material for judgment purposes to a comprehensive meeting of the adjudicatory committee. The discussions of the adjudicatory team as they see the actual submissions before their very eyes is necessarily objective in nature, but it is theoretically quite possible that this objectivity might constitute the subjectivity of the particular team involved. Accordingly, in order to strengthen the objective value of the assessment, the submissions are looked at once again to assess whether they are subjective or objective on the basis of a finely structured, expert and professional standpoint involving judges from other teams, team heads, section heads, and a special task force. Assessment is then reached for the Good Design Awards in the form of G-Mark selection, intended as "attestation" of the worth of the submissions.
The G-Mark system is not a system selecting outstanding works in the context of a design competition. There is also criticism of the fact that almost 40% of the submissions are given Good Design awards. But the very fact that this is an awards system involving selection and recognition means that we have no alternative but to recognize that its appeal and promotion are still inadequate.

Are awards all about prizes or selection?
Since the G-Mark system was originally an institution in its own right, a clear historical awareness is needed within the historical context of privatization concerning attestation in the manner assumed by the Good Design awards.
In the past, the G-Mark evaluation was granted as a means of recognition of products selected for their properties as "Good Design." However, rather than being considered as specially selected products, products selected in this manner were merely equated with the verbal concept of the Good Design awards.
Together with the process of privatization, recognition by means of the G-Mark meant little more than that the Good Design awards were thought of as mere awards pure and simple. It was because of this that criticism was directed toward the sheer quantity of the awards made. This resulted in people advocating that the G-Mark system itself be abolished. Advocacy of abolition of the system seems to me to have been based on a shallow approach tantamount to an unnoticed abnegation of Japan's identity as a trading nation.
In the final analysis, the G-Mark system of selection and evaluation is a system of awards, but at the same time it is a selective system, and the process leading up to the selection is indicative of the design-related problems that it involves. "Good Design" as a mode of selection constitutes recognition of the value of a particular product in terms of its design, in other words of whether a product satisfies the criteria of appropriateness and impressiveness on the level of design. Recognition under this system constitutes a form of approval in institutional terms aimed at promoting design in a social context. Accordingly, as far as the submitters are concerned, being granted an award increasingly amounts to a thorough awareness that is all about being awarded the Gold Prize or another special prize. For designers making submissions, the fact that selection amounts to little more than a mark of approval means that there has been an increase in the number of submissions taking account from the outset of how the evaluations are made.
The range of items to which design is applicable is constantly increasing. We need to be aware that the award of a prize that marks approval of the results of the design process is what G-Mark recognition is all about.
What this means is that items eligible for submission are eligible for the award of a prize and for selection as a mark of approval, these two features constituting their design value. The problem for the future posed by the system of design promotion based on the G-Mark is that this design value cannot be translated into corporate strategy or into administrative strategy and social strategy.

Posing problems as a general criticism of the examination process
At the start, one gained the impression that there are many manufacturers who are still clinging to the idea of design as no more than a superficial feature. This applies especially to industrial design, in other words to the commercial products sector as a whole. The root of the problem is that many people continue to think of design merely as a type of added value and in terms of marketing based on market segmentation.
Products equipped with a concentration of highly dense electronics technology incorporate the most advanced technology along with the results of the efforts made specifically in Japan. But the reality is that the sense of value of these products on the market is inferior to that of brand products with the same market price due to economic and fashion considerations that one might think of in terms of cultural value. For example, 1.6 million yen is a price that might be charge for a car or for a high-class wristwatch with a famous brand name attached. Bags and cases bearing a well-known brand name that cost the same as an electronic device equipped with a concentrated and compact array of advanced technology are all the products of a design strategy.
Expressed in simple terms, one might talk about an opposition here between industrial products featuring concentrations of intelligent content and the design value of bags and wristwatches which are the product of traditional skills. Moreover, the reality is that brands are equipped with economic and cultural design value.
We need also to consider why the decline of the IT industry cannot be stopped by design and why design strategy is unable to revive branches of industry laboring under the effects of recession or to create new branches in every area of industrial endeavor from advanced technology to traditional industries.
The point I would like to make is that a design strategy based on discrimination by means of design conceived as added value is wholly mistaken in terms of an appeal to purchasers and consumers with disposable income.
Grading consumers and discriminating between products on this basis is merely a nonsensical design strategy involving discrimination between consumers themselves. It involves manufacturers imposing class and rank distinctions on people in terms of what they purchase.
Even the trend-based fixing of market prices in the form of open prices amounts to a denial of the fact that production and design constitute total value. There isn't likely to be any benefit accruing from business investment in types of production that are self-denying. This means that one of the major errors committed by modern industry and one of the main causes of recession inhere within design strategy.
The era when design was a form of added value has come to an end. Design is total value and it must not be conceived as a means for differentiating products.
In order for it to be able to give rise to product value, design conceived as it has been until recently as a means of stimulating material desire has thus become separated from its original essence, that is to say a manifestation of ideals, value, dependability and likeability.

The attestability aimed at by the Communication Design Category
The essence of design as total value is thus subject to evaluation with the examination criteria enclosed clearly in the Communication Design Category. This means that products are themselves media in their own right and that there is a need for communication, or more specifically interaction, between products and consumers.
In other words, in the fields of corporate strategy, consolidation of social infrastructure, architecture and the environment, communication is in itself a key concept, topic and object.
A Media Design Prize was instituted last year and was awarded to a television program. In my opinion, not only television programs but movies too should be considered to be the objects of design. What this means is that, in my opinion, objects and phenomena which are designed or are the objects of design are absolutely in need of conceptual and design features which realize perfection and conciseness as modes of communication in the social sense. Communication is all about "desirability and attractiveness" that can be shared and distributed.
The visual communication and informational awareness with which graphic design was originally concerned did not in any way involve the generation of effective communication by means of value to which design was added. Visual identification of companies employing corporate markings and their applications that inclined solely to design pure and simple as a means of generating a sense of corporate identity became very popular at one time especially among companies involved in the field of finance, but even the social standing and worth of financial institutions is now being called into question.
The basis for the value of design lies in the ethical, existential and contributory features of the whole range of corporate activities and goes to prove that the trust placed in this identity makes it possible for companies to be profitable.
The fact that the communications sector is now being covered by the G-Mark system should be regarded as symbolizing the attestation and evaluation of what constitutes good design in terms of communication in social terms and in terms of the present era.

New Frontier Design Category opens new design fields
The ideas that constitute the fountainhead of design require an interdisciplinary approach and crossover between different domains in terms of their origins and their development. This often means that the results tend to be unclear. But in order for such borderless concepts to be constructed, there is a high probability that design will be incorporated, and one may interpret this to mean that incorporation of design is a prerogative.
At present, products developed by companies and activities aimed at formulating and constructing concepts on the part of research institutes, governmental organizations and NPOs, etc., can all be thought of in terms of design activities. Moreover, the intellectual approach present within such a starting point has effects and repercussions on society through its realization by means of design.
Today, when we are out of the industrial age and have entered an age of information, it is only to be expected that design should be applied to everything extending as far as networks and proposals for social systems. The structure represented by the production and consumption of commercial products needs to get enmeshed into the cyclic process represented by the collection of materials, production, announcement, advertising, consumption, scrapping and recycling. Collaboration between producers, government and academia and everything from simple local industries to networked contracts must be designed. The model cases for this purpose need to be adapted to society as business plans, business models or as social design.
Because of this, it seems likely that the Good Design mark, with its verified institutional status, will expand yet further to other fields of design in the future. Moreover, this will involve not just an expansion of the fields of design and the subjects with which design is concerned but also a reassessment of design as such.
If there are present any limits and boundaries to corporate design, I believe that we should be looking to the development of new brands based on collaboration on an interdisciplinary and inter-industrial basis.
The framework made up of individual companies, government agencies, local communities and regional industries needs thus to be opened up to open the way to design in the setting of entirely new domains.
This year we have seen submissions extending as far as crisis management and safety networks. I hope that these domains will help us to reach conclusions about what precisely constitutes good design as required by the present age.

Promoting design in architecture and the environment
Architecture and the environment were previously grouped together as parts of the "Facilities" category, but these two fields are now examined separately. Hitherto, items that qualified for the G-Mark in this category were expected to be buildings with commercial features, and even then these had to be the products of housing manufacturers. However, the facilities of government agencies and organizations and of companies are such that the concept of the environment is thought of as belonging to same category as buildings. This equation needs to be reconsidered in the light of the present age, but we have not yet reached the stage of establishing a theoretical basis in this regard.
This gives some indication of how environmental design and architectural design show that basic reforms are needed in the very nature of spatial design in the information-oriented society.
Architecture needs to show how good design can be incorporated into detached houses for single households. Generally speaking, I reckon that the era when the G-Mark was awarded to housing based on patterned designs and intended for mass production is now well and truly over.
I even look forward to hearing people say how they were brought up in a G-Mark house. The proportion of houses bearing the G-Mark in each Japanese prefecture is one criterion by which one can judge the standard of housing in a prefecture, and encouraging this amounts to a attestation of architectural design.
From the standpoint of a trading nation, one hopes that the housing industry will develop into an industry that is fully capable of exporting its products. I feel therefore that there is a need not for houses with a wide range of equipment and facilities but for the development of hardware in the form of dwellings.
The fact that box-type constructions associated with governmental authorities are given the Good Design status should not be thought of as an evaluation of the design of the hardware as represented by the buildings themselves but as an assessment how convenient they are to use and the value that they have in their respective regions. The evaluation goes as far as design including "software" aspects. One should of course make it clear also that there are examination criteria to the effect that the process extending to the construction of facilities and environments should also be taken into consideration.
In this sense, every aspect from the actual features to the method and history of environmental designs that qualify as Good Design serves as a means for questioning once again what precisely we mean by environmental design, while architectural design already provides an institutional basis for giving consideration to the features of environments, visual appearance and the nature of housing. The awards are thus able to serve the function of encouraging the realization of ideals that deserve to be acknowledged.

The G-Mark system in the future
The G-Mark system has now been in existence for almost half a century as a privately run system of attestation and commendation. The system has developed together with the design profession and with the tradition formed by the ideals and philosophy inherent within design.
As the chairman of the adjudicatory panel, I must express my conclusions for the present year concerning the effects of the commendation and attestation occurring under this system.
Expressed in a nutshell, I have considered the ultimate roles that design aims to realize in terms of attestation as system and system as attestation. From these two angles I have made a distinction between products covered by this year's Good Design awards as symbolized by the Gold Prize and the Special Prizes, which I recognize as excellent designs.
It struck me that there are still relatively products and submissions that seem worthy of "attestation as system." In order to enter into this category, submissions should be examples of good design linked to social systems bound up with human life, safety and security.
Objects eligible for consideration in terms of "system as attestation" need to be those that open up new vistas on design. This is because I hope that attestation will provide a social motive for the creation of social systems.
I personally feel that design that is able to respond to these two orientations should no longer be concerned with design for design's sake but should aim at the development of revolutionary design methods appropriate to this century and to the achievement of real results in the field of design.
The G-Mark system is still essentially a model for design promotion policy. But although the word "design" has become fully accepted in everyday parlance, I hope that the future direction of design will be determined not on the basis of an attempt to ask precisely what constitutes good design, but on why a particular item should be regarded as an example of good design, that is to say on the basis of consideration of prize-winning commended products.
There is no question here of "good design" being determined on the basis of a subjective aesthetic approach. In order for a product to be regarded as an example of good design, the intrinsic worth of an attested design must have its own raison d'etre within a social context.
Good design of course means beauty of form. Form is something intrinsically pleasing, and at the same time it offers a raison d'etre within a social context that enables us to share the respect for life that inheres within.
This means to say that the value of being is something that needs to be attested and commended. For as long as the system under which this attestation is commended remains in existence, I feel sure that design promotion policy-no matter whether it is privatized or not-will plays its part in assuring the Japanese identity.