A total of six entries were nominated for the grand prize of the 2002 Good Design Award, namely, the "Moerenuma Park," the "Waste Plastic Recycling Project," the "'Life With PhotoCinema' image editing software program," the "EXILIM Series of Digital Still Cameras," the "9-Tsubo House" and the "Neoball Z Fluorescent Light Bulbs." On October 30, displays of these six items were set out at the Hotel East 21 Hall in Tokyo, presentations were given by each of the nominees, and the votes then got underway. The method used to determine the recipient of this prestigious award, which goes by the name of WRM (winners relationship management) in imitation of IR (investor relationship), was adopted for the first time since an award was established for the G-Mark back in 1980.
As a result of the votes cast, the "Moerenuma Park" was chosen to receive the grand prize. Since one of the criteria for selecting the candidates short listed for the award was excellence, the Moerenuma Park was chosen as having the most excellent design for the year 2002. In the following pages, my intention is to explore and identify recent design trends on the basis of the six entries which were nominated for the grand prize of the Good Design Award 2002.

"Good design" after half a century has passed
The year 2002 should go down as a memorable year for Japanese design. One reason is because it marks the fiftieth anniversary of both the withdrawal of the Occupation forces from Japan and the full-blown commencement of design activities in 1952. It was also the year when products exported from Japan ceased to bear the "Made in Occupied Japan" stamp and starting carrying the "Made in Japan" mark instead. It saw the fiftieth anniversary of the Japan Industrial Designers Association which was commemorated with activities kicking off at 2 PM on October 18, exactly fifty years--and not even one hour later--since the Association was originally established. It was also in this year that the "Origins of Design," the name given to the exhibition to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Japan Design Committee, which was established the following year in 1953, was staged at the Matsuya Department Store on the Ginza from September 4 through 9. Incidentally, the organization whose name I mentioned last was originally called the International Design Committee, but it was renamed the Good Design Committee during the period from 1959 to 1963. A major event to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Japanese Society for the Science of Design which was also founded in 1953 is scheduled to be held in 2003. The comments made on the occasion of the inauguration of the Committee--by the way, it was Masaru Katsumi who was responsible for the wording of this Committee and who made such a significant contribution to the creation of these three organizations--contain a wealth of suggestions and are of great interest in the context of today's Good Design Award.
"Art, design and architecture are mutually inseparable constituent elements of the human activities that are geared to pursuing the beauty of shapes in any given age. They are often viewed as separate fields of cultural endeavor or as mutually opposing activities, but specialization and differentiation can be endorsed only as the prerequisite for across-the-board progress in human civilization. We reject a mutual lack of understanding, preconceived ideas and error-prone arbitrary decisions by experts. We herewith re-confirm the necessity for continued unflagging cooperation." (These comments were originally made in English and then translated into Japanese by Masaru Katsumi.) Among the 15 founding members were the critics Masaru Katsumi, Shuzo Takiguchi and Ryuichi Hamaguchi. Their ranks were filled with design, art and architectural controversialists.
Perhaps the "Moerenuma Park," which rose from the environmental unit that parted company from Architecture and Environment Design Category this year to win the grand prize, is the embodiment of the hopes and wishes voiced by the Committee that was established exactly a half-century ago. Since most of the votes cast this time were from the in-house designers of corporations, the grand prize can be said to represent the intentions of industrial designers. As early as 1933, Isamu Noguchi, the American sculptor who worked on outdoor land-related projects, came up with the idea of an earth-works which could well be described as the original form of the "Moerenuma Park," and he left behind a play mountain, which represents the central molding of this particular project, in bronze. This molding is an unfinished project which has not been given actual form anywhere in the world except in SapporoCity. The park is scheduled to be completed in 2004, a year which will mark the hundredth anniversary of Noguchi's birth.
The fact that the sole industrial designer among the founding members of the Committee, Sori Yanagi, was selected as a "person of cultural merit" is similarly symbolic. It is probably the first time that a designer of kettles, bowls and stools has been honored with this kind of award.

The theme of recycling
I wonder if it was appropriate to select candidates for a prestigious award on the basis of the word "excellence." Thoughts like this still bother me. The card-sized "EXILIM" digital still camera measures 88 x 55 x 11.3 millimeters. The image editing software program and fluorescent light bulbs belong in this category. The "9-Tsubo House" measures 5.4 meters square while the "Moerenuma Park" occupies an area of 188 hectares, and between them comes Nippon Steel's coke oven for recycling waste plastics. For some reason, the results of the votes for the award recipients were cast virtually according to the "size and scale" sequence of their entries.
Searching for some evidence to refute this suspicion of mine, I open up a book called "S, M, L, XL." Written by Rem Koolhaus and designed by Bruce Mau, this is an international edition which was published by Taschen in 1997. In this thick volume with its more than 1300 pages, the projects tackled by Koolhaus and his architectural office OMA are edited using "small," "medium," "large" and "extra-large" as the standards, something that gave rise to some controversy. Even if one were to base one's judgment on the works shown in this book in which even the Fukuoka project called "Nexus" (1991) is listed as "small," it is not likely that the results would be arranged in sequence of size. If this is the case, I wonder if any doubts voiced about the results of the voting that virtually conform to size were doubts that arose from the fact that those voting are so used to the specialization and differentiation which were aspects recognized with a proviso by Masaru Katsumi. Somehow or other, it appears better to search elsewhere for the key to understanding the results of the voting. The keyword that comes to mind here is "recycling."
It is easy to see that Nippon Steel's "Waste Plastic Recycling Project" involves the recycling of waste. At the heart of this technology, which is said to be the first of its kind in the world, is a process which heats the coke oven to 1200 degrees and enables the hydrocarbon oils (light oil, tar), the coke oven gases and the coke to be recovered. Since the waste plastics are carbonized at high temperature, no toxic substances are left behind. The hydrocarbon oils can be applied for use in resins and as chemical raw materials, the coke serves as a reducing agent for iron ore, and the coke oven gases can be re-used as fuel gases in steel works and by power stations. The proportions recycled break down into 40% for the hydrocarbons, 20% for the coke and 40% for the coke oven gases. A total of 40% of the waste plastics are transformed into virgin plastics.
However, what makes this project like "Colombus's proverbial egg (something that constitutes a seemingly impossible achievement until it has been actually tried and easily accomplished)" is not so much the actual oil reduction technology but more the fact that an existing coke oven was used for this purpose. As far as waste plastics are concerned, the use of biodegradable plastics has not moved ahead--something which is contrary to expectations--and even the method developed by the BASF group in Germany in 1994 which reduced wastes to oils using chemical processing and which became a talking point never left the laboratory. The recycling of energy through combustion has advanced because of new ideas such as these. What Nippon Steel opted for as it proceeded with its research and development activities is the utilization of its existing facilities. Its decision signifies a breaking of the taboo against throwing waste into a coke oven--an act that is tantamount to sacrilege as far as the steel-making industry is concerned. What ends up being actually recycled by this project is not just the waste but also the coke ovens themselves.
The Moere marsh was a landfill site. After the Sapporo municipal authorities used it for landfill after 1979, it became a site where work started on preparing the foundations for a park with a view to having the land used effectively. On the afternoon of March 30, 1988, Isamu Noguchi visited the marsh. Noguchi, who had not been impressed by the Woods of Art and the site of the Sapporo Technical College today, became very animated when he caught sight of the marsh. He observed the grand topography of the site with water surrounding it and with mountains visible in the distance, and he noted that all this had nothing left of the natural topography since it was a landfill with rubbish and waste underneath it. In terms of the most salient reasons why he took such a liking to the site, he said that he could do just as he pleased and that he could move around it freely. This was reported at a discussion session given at the Spring Convention of the Design Research Association, which was held at the Sapporo Technical College in June 2000 by Hiroshi Yamamoto who had accompanied Noguchi on that day in March 1988 and who was the head of the section responsible for preserving woods and forests. The image of Yamamoto, the moderator of the session, leaning forward imposingly to make these remarks is still fresh in my memory.
Ten years later, the marsh, which had appeared to have nothing beautiful about it, was opened to the public as a children's dreams-come-true playground. Noguchi left some words behind him: he said that unless human beings and nature can maintain a healthy relationship, human beings will be reduced to a pitiful state. With a view to being the heir to such ideas, the city of Sapporo set itself the task of successfully reducing the impact on its environment by incorporating an air conditioning system that uses snow for the "Glass Pyramid," a central facility, and by employing a water purification system that uses coral and bacteria for the "Moere Beach" where ripples roll in. In this way, then, the land itself has ended up being recycled.

Digging up history and ideas
Casio Computer's digital still camera features the "compact design" that Japan is so good at creating. Personally, I like the fact that the lens area is reminiscent of one of Mickey Mouse's ears. It was back in 1950 when Diners, the world's first credit card company, started issuing its cards. These cards that were originally made of paper were not issued in Japan. The first prepaid cards that the Japanese were able to lay their hands on were the telephone cards issued by NTT (Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Public Corporation) in 1982. Casio came out with its SL-800, an ultra-slim card-sized pocket calculator measuring 85 x 54 x 0.8 mm and featuring a TAB LSI chip and film solar cell, in 1980. It was the latest successor to the "Casio Mini," a calculator that was said to "give the answers right away." It is miniaturization where Casio's forte lies. It was inevitable that the company, which launched the Casio Mini on the market thirty years ago, should have created a digital still camera as small as a credit card in 2002. I can't help thinking that what has been recycled here is history itself.
If we look back on Japan's history of miniaturization design, we encounter the house with the smallest possible living space. This kind of house has been proposed by various individuals including Kiyoshi Seike, Yo Ikebe and Kunio Maekawa: in fact, Makoto Masuzawa (1925-1990), the architect, announced a prototype for a dwelling with the smallest possible living space in 1952. Perhaps by coincidence, a designer with the same first name, Makoto Koizumi, redesigned a dwelling of this nature exactly a half-century later, and he called it the "9-Tsubo House." From the example given here, it is easy to read the recycling of design ideas from this context.
Dwellings in the form of the 9-tsubo house are not meant to be order-made homes. Rather, they are to be designed by architects and designers and purchased by home owners as easily as consumers buy furniture or a car. They can be described as heading in the same direction as the Walkman, Swatch, jeans and AKARI (Isamu Noguchi) which Issey Miyake emulated in creating the "A-POC" which won the prestigious 2000 G-Mark Grand Prize, and the "Pleats Please." The 18-foot x 18-foot square floor plan, 3-tsubo open ceiling, gabled roof exterior, round columns and openings in the main facade constitute the five basic rules for a house with the smallest possible living space that was created in this project. These five basic rules are reminiscent of "What is Modern Design?", a booklet written by Edgar Kaufman.
What is so excellent about this booklet published by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1950 is its well-known 12 theorems. The first theorem states that modern design should fill the actual needs of modern life; the second that modern design should express the spirit of our times; the third that modern design should benefit from the current progress made in pure art and pure science; and the fourth that modern design should make free use of new materials and new technologies for the advancement of the existing ones. The twelfth theorem, which is the last one, states that modern design should serve the public as widely as possible and, while challenging the need for the gorgeous and splendid as a matter of course, it should also take into account moderate desires and limited prices as well. There is no way that the advocates of dwellings with the smallest possible living space could have been unaware of these theorems.
The Kaufman family owns Frank Lloyd Wright's "Rakusuisho" and Neutra's villa, and the author himself is director of the New York Museum of Modern Art. It was in 1950 that the Museum and the Chicago Merchandise Mart started the good design screening. The establishment of the Japan Design Committee was tied in with events such as this. Makoto Masuzawa was not one of the founding members, but it is clear that he was tuned to the spirit of the times.

The year of victory for ecology design
Every mention of the word "recycling" in this context is not synonymous with ecology. Even so, while I was listening to the results of the voting, I was overwhelmed with deep emotion at the news that ecology design had claimed victory in winning this year's Good Design Award. Despite its being an entry in a new area, the project that Nippon Steel submitted as a contender for the prize was unmistakably an eco-project, and the fact that the Neoball that cuts power consumption by 80% had won the Ecology Design Award had already been determined by the time the votes were cast. Even the "Moerenuma Park" itself was replete with the designs of Isamu Noguchi--the individual who was responsible for the master plan--that took the global environment into consideration.
In 1980, Toshiba Lighting and Technology Cooperation became the first company in the world to develop fluorescent light bulbs shaped like regular light bulbs. The Neoball light bulbs aimed to pursue energy conservation, compact sizes and esthetic forms and serve as a new source of light that would be an alternative to incandescent light bulbs. The power consumption ratio of the whole light bulbs is a high 19%, and their performance has a greater effect than imagined on the overall power consumption. The prize-winning "60W Type Ref Light Bulb Models" designed for commercial uses successfully reduced the power consumption and calorific value to one-fifth and prolonged the service life 6-fold while providing the same brightness as generally available light bulbs. It is said that if 80% of the 60W light bulbs used throughout the country (approximately 36 million units) were replaced with the "Neoball Z," what would be achieved as a result would be equivalent to an annual reduction of some 380,000 kiloliters of crude oil and about 640,000 tons of carbon dioxide.
The four facilities run by Nippon Steel for recycling waste plastics currently have a processing capacity of approximately 120,000 tons. The company's share of the processing of waste plastics segregated under the Containers and Packaging Recycling Law enforced in April 2000 stands at about 40%. In view of the fact that the company can expect income from technological fees in addition to the income it will receive for processing costs from local government authorities under contract and income from the sales of light oils and tar, it appears to have won the de facto right to determine prices when it comes to bidding for local government projects. When the segregation of household waste plastics amounting to 5 million tons or so annually as called for under the Containers and Packaging Recycling Law moves further ahead, there is the latent possibility for all these waste plastics to be recycled. Seeing as inquiries concerning the transfer of this technology have already been received from other countries such as France, South Korea and China, there is no doubt that this is a system that is the focus of worldwide attention.
The 2001 Ecology Design Prize was won by the "Reproduction of Tableware" and the "Glass Recycling Network." "Reproduction of Tableware" was also nominated for the grand prize. In 2002, the same award was won by the "DNA Series of Eco-Tires" and the "Roof-top Landscaping System" as well as by "Neoball Z." Patents have been obtained in Japan, the United States, Germany and France for the Eco-Tires.
The fact that some results of the moves made by local government authorities have already been seen deserves some attention. The Re-Tableware was a joint project between government agencies and academia in which Professor Nobuo Sato of the Industrial Design Department, Molding Faculty at the Aichi Sangyo University was responsible for the design. Furthermore, it is quite encouraging to see that the waste plastics recycling project, Neoball light bulbs and Eco-Tires are the first such developments in the world. After having been through energy conservation, the eco-boom and the end to eco-advertisements due to the bursting of the bubble economy, ecology design has become a topic of great urgency to be tackled by this industry. Nippon Steel's project, which was also selected for the President's Award, speaks of just how promising recycling is for the survival of the steel industry that reached its peak production volumes thirty years ago. The 2002 Good Design Award was the stage on which ecology design won a resounding victory.

Communication as weapon
Having said this, there's some still room to examine why Nippon Steel's project should be considered a design. In the IT Division where Katsuhiko Otani, the manager of the company's Environment Department, used to work, the flow of operations development apparently was concept -> design -> engineering.
Design did not mean a process that followed engineering. Manager Otani is quoted as saying that it was natural to consider the company's project as "social systems design." The project may have had nothing to do with the "industrial design" for industrial society. However, if the "knowledge design" for the twenty-first century type of knowledge-oriented society is invoked, design relates to the entire process of value production rather than being either one of the processes of production or added value. Similarly, now that the heyday of "graphics" is over, communication design that is compatible with the production services that replace industry and that generates experiential value takes on an importance of its own.
Among the particulars of the directors in charge of soliciting candidates for the Good Design Award, the name of Reiji Oshima of Oshima Design and Associates is clearly indicated alongside two individuals from the Environment Department of Nippon Steel Oshima was in charge of communication design, a job that entailed educating the general public and local government authorities about the sophisticated technology of the project. In order to solve environmental problems, environmental science and improved awareness of the general public have to fit hand in glove. In the project concerned, the precision with which the general public segregates its garbage determines whether the recycling of waste plastics will succeed or fail. If we consider that putting the general public and government authorities in touch with technology constitutes communication activities, then there is no limit to what designers can do.
The communication design for the "Design Management of Yahata Neji" that won the Prize of the Chairman of the Chairman Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry President's Award was more direct. What supports the distribution of 50,000 product items and fastening parts which are shipped in 180,000 packages in a 1-month period is not just the databases that are the pride of the company and the use of computers. It is the designing of all aspects of communication such as the logos, packages, displays, catalogs and web-sites. It is because of the design work that attempts to show the screw functions for what they really are that the company's product groups have been brought to the attention of the general public and that Yahata Neji(Yahata screw) has come into the limelight. If Yahata Neji's design is what has put its products in the limelight, it is the "Design no Kaibou (Dissecting Design)" that won the Gold Prize which dissects the products. I might point out that this is an exhibition which has been held three times since 2001 by the fore-mentioned Japan Design Committee. Serving as the prepared specimens were "Xylitol (gum)" "Utsurun-desu (recyle compact camera made of paper)" and "Ricca-chan (toy doll)" who was created in 1967. Disassembled down to the minimum screw part, these products tell the story that there are reasons behind all the product shapes and symbols in a way that anyone can easily understand. This was perhaps the exhibition that gave new credence to the expression "God is in the details" to designers who should have known this to begin with.
Incidentally, it might be said that the ability to interact is one yardstick for measuring the quality of communication. The "'Life With PhotoCinema' image editing software program," which was nominated for the grand prize, was what best fitted in with this theme this year. With this program, the users can create 'photo cinema' automatically by selecting the desired photos and music, and they can send it to other peoples without having to thumb through a thick manual. When the selection was actually being made for the prize, a vivid presentation of the program was given, and this introduced some confusion into the sequence in which the votes cast corresponded to the sizes, and this might have been the one that was filled with risks as far as the professional designers and design educators were concerned. It is more fitting to describe Kotaro Hirano, Taku Sato and Tomoyasu Hirano who made all this happen as communicators rather than graphic designers.

What's in store for design on its long journey
In September, I went to see a special show entitled "Edo lacquerware--Koetsu, Korin and Yoyusai" which had "Acme of design, skills in gold and silver" as its motif. It was held to commemorate the 130th anniversary of the founding of the Tokyo National Museum. The collection of items of luxury that were exhibited told of the inheritance, new departures, innovations, refinements, realism, curious skills and exportation during the Edo Period of the art of lacquerware that was perfected in the Muromachi Period, and it was well worth seeing. The transformation in style reminded me even of the theory behind the changes in Greek art.
The origins of the special qualities that established themselves in the publication entitled "Structure of the Subtle" issued (in 1983) to commemorate the Japan Industrial Designers Association's thirtieth anniversary were found in those exhibits. It was this exhibition that made me think just how much has been lost.
It was also in September that I experienced the adjudication of the "Japan Textile Contest 2002." This competition of actual works was held in Owari Ichinomiya, the district with traditions that go back to the Azuchi-Momoyama Period. A special exhibition of the winning works will be staged at "Expofil", an international thread and yarn trade show held in Paris. On the same day as the adjudication, I wrote an article entitled "What's in store for textiles on its long journey" as a critical piece for release to journalists. It is strange that I felt as I could track back through this journey to the dawn of civilization just because it was called "textiles" rather than "textile design."
When it comes to the Good Design Award, design specialization and differentiation are about to be overthrown. The four departments of Products, Architecture and Environment, Communication and New Frontier are all on equal footing, and it is how deeply and in what way the adjudicators resonate with and feel moved by the projects that determine what will win the grand prize and special prize. The word "excellence" is, then, sufficient to describe their resonance. I felt for a moment that the hopes and wishes of sensible people who lived a half-century ago and who believed that we must cooperate continually for the benefit of human culture on a truly global scale are becoming realized now with artists standing shoulder to shoulder with designers and architects.
"Recycling," one of this year's key words, now applies to substances, the land, history and thinking. Unlike the arbitrary quotations of the post-modern age, some definite reasons are required when it comes to recycling. Its products sometimes surpass their forms and are called systems. The "Moerenuma Park" and the waste plastics recycling project were symbols of what is happening in this respect in the year 2002.