The Personal-use Products Category is a broad genre, containing the items most intimately associated with our lives, and as happened last year, when the Category was reorganized, each of the two groups, Group 1: Bodily Needs, Sports, Hobbies, and Group 2: Personal Media, was screened by five Judges. The total number of items screened was 669 (395 in Group 1 and 274 in Group 2), which means that this category had the second-largest number of items exhibited after the Family-use Products Category (725 items). If I could summarize the special features of this category in a few words, I would have to say that the genre encompasses an extremely wide and rich variety of products. If we look at Group 1, we see everything from cosmetics to coffins, including lingerie and swimsuits, clocks and eyeglasses, musical instruments, sporting goods, electric wheelchairs, bicycles, and motorbikes. In Group 2 are cellular phones, mobile information terminals, personal computers, system components, digital cameras, and other electronic devices. Some might see this category as including anything that an individual might use, but even within this broad definition, the circumstances under which the items are used differ in terms of time, space, and even mindset. There is a hierarchy of values appropriate for each of these circumstances, and a multifaceted style of screening is required. In addition, there are many competing participants within the same genre (for example, eyeglasses, cellular phones, etc.), which made me feel how difficult it would be to conduct a thorough-going screening just on the basis of the G-Mark screening criteria. However, if we look at matters from another point of view, the various things or various circumstances or various functions that we use daily on a most intimate basis are the special feature of this category. Therefore, raising the quality of these things, making them better, more beautiful, and easier to use amounts to raising the quality of our lives. In that sense, even though screening this category is a laborious task, it is well worth doing.
This time, 46.2% of all of Category A received the G-Mark (37.7% of Group 1 and 58.4% of Group 2), which was above 43%, the average for the A, B, C, and D Product Categories taken together. This year also saw an attempt to improve the first-stage screening method from last year's document screening to online screening, but we think that there is still room for improvement in such areas as changing the system design for each category.

 
ARE THEY ATTRACTIVE AS PRODUCTS?

Aside from a few items for professional use, the exhibits in Groups 1 and 2 were almost all items used in daily life. In other words, they were the products most often seen in stores. We might even say that they were the products that create the ambience of a store.
Naturally, each product is discussed and screened on the basis of the G-Mark category criteria, but in addition the attractiveness of the products is an important point to consider. Unless the product has functionality, safety, the ability to solve a problem, a feeling of completeness, price, and the ability to earn various other category points, it will not be attractive for personal use and people will not want to have it for their own. These are products that create the ambience of a store, that we wear or hold in our hands, that we put in our rooms, products that are almost parts of our bodies. For that very reason, the two trends of "creating attraction" and "making people feel the attraction" may have significant power (the role of design) to improve the quality of life of both the designer and the consumer.

 
ABOUT THE GOLD PRIZES

A total of four items received the Gold Prizes: the Mizuno Corporation and Speedo's Fast Skin competitive swimsuit in Group 1, and three items from Group 2, namely, the Computer Microscope by Intel, the Headphone by Bang & Olufsen, and the PHS Modem Card by NTT DoCoMo. These four items seem in some sense to embody the contemporary spirit of the year 2000. The competitive swimsuit was developed just in time for this year's Sidney Olympics, and the greatest challenge was to reduce the water resistance in events in which the swimmers compete for every 0.1 second advantage. This challenge was solved in a wonderful manner through the development of new materials and cutting technology. The three items in Group 2 are media for seeing, hearing, and sending data (transmitting/receiving mobile terminals), the culmination and epitome of the twentieth-century technology, and a consummate design congenial to the user's natural patterns of usage and sense of touch (skin, eyes, and ears). What these four products have in common is the sense of being "attractive as products," as described above.