This year, a total of 2,212 products, facilities, and themes applied for the Good Design Award, and of these, 401, or about 20%, were in Group B-1 alone. Group B is categorized as Family-use Products, but if we break it down further, Group B-1 covers products intimately connected with people's daily lives, including furniture, items for everyday use, and sundries. The overall impression gained from looking at this year's entries was that most products had very mature designs. With a few exceptions, we saw mostly unassuming, well-finished products.
The products in this Group can be divided in any number of ways. One is the so-called "household white goods," which includes refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and other kitchen appliances. Next is the group of audio-visual products, including television sets and video and audio equipment, but since this is the Family-use Category, high-end audio devices used mainly by individual hobbyists are screened in the Personal-use Category. The next group is information devices, but since most cellular phones and personal computers also belong in the Personal-use Category, the group is limited to household telephones and fax machines that families share. Household heating and cooling units and air purifiers were also entered, but the kind of air conditioning or other such facilities and devices that require significant installation work belong in the Facilities Category, so the ones in the this group are mostly the portable models.
The nearly half of the products remaining are composed of a truly abundant variety of products, including gardening implements, pet supplies, do-it-yourself supplies, and miscellaneous everyday items.

 
Adjudication Overview

This fiscal year we tried an application and screening process carried out on CD-ROM and over the Internet. Even though taking advantage of digital media proved to be an extremely interesting experiment, in the end, there were limits to how well the digital images could be reproduced. We were therefore unable to decide whether to accept or reject many of the products entered, and as a result, we let some of them pass the first-stage screening with reservations. This forced us to conduct the main screening with the actual items, without having narrowed the field of candidates, but there was no other way to avoid the risk of rejecting a product simply on the basis of insufficient information.
After the process described above, we assembled over 360 entries in a hall and conducted the main screening. Our general impression at that time was that the level of maturity of design had increased and that most of the products inspired a sense of confidence. On the other hand, we thought that there were noticeable discrepancies among the product categories, so that confusion arose concerning certain genres.
The most mature product designs among household "white goods," of which refrigerators are a typical example, have given up their previous tactics of competing on the basis of meaningless differences in shape, and one gets the feeling that they have settled upon designing for real ease of use. In comparison, the designs of washing machines and other appliances still have not been standardized, partly because they are still undergoing improvements and innovations in various mechanisms.
For example, there were formerly no apparent differences among refrigerators except minor details such as the shape of the door handle, so designers turned their attention to giving this functionally simple component a unique shape. However, in this year's group of entries, the products from all the companies have made improvements to the door handle that emphasize function rather than form, and since they are aiming for ease of use, they paradoxically end up putting designs with unique handles on the market. A typical example is Toshiba's "GR-412FSK," which has received high marks for its universal design, in which the door opens automatically when one presses the handle.
On the other hand, there has been a lot of talk about Matsushita Electric's upright fully automatic washer dryer "NA-FD8000," which is last year's spin-dry washing machine with the addition of a drying function. Yet, it has been difficult to discern any overall design of them, and the manufacturers still seem to be aiming for slight variations in form. In particular, if a company is trying to make the display on its operating panel easier to read, simply making the characters bigger will not do the trick.
Last year, electric rice cookers appeared to be over-designed, but the entries for this year seemed to carry this trend even further. Cooking rice is at the heart of Japan's culinary culture, and the rice cookers that perform this function have become deeply entrenched in people's daily lives. They would seem to require a design with a clean, warm, cheerful image, but at present, the way the materials have been worked, the treatment of the display area, and all the other elements are very complicated, and the rice cookers do not look at all like appliances for cooking delicious rice. This criticism was reflected in the low selection rate for this product.
Similarly, the screening committee had doubts about the way in which the styling of telephones, fax machines, and copiers for household use seemed to be excessively emotional when compared to similar items for business use. We don't necessarily believe that equipment for household use and office use should be the same, but we wonder if the first consideration shouldn't be ease of use.
Kitchen ranges with ovens, particularly those from South Korean companies, displayed a dynamic shape styling not seen in previous models, but in most cases, the intent of that type of styling was unclear, and we were reluctant to choose ranges that had innovative shapes unrelated to their function.
In the area of miscellaneous items, products for relaxation, gardening, and pets attracted the most notice, and in addition, great care seemed to have been taken in the design of organizers and storage products for bathroom areas and containers for food products. But first of all, the products in this area seemed to lack originality, and secondly, either the design or the product lacked a sense of completeness, so many of them failed to receive prizes.

 
Evaluation of the Designs

It is clearly futile to judge television sets, refrigerators, and toilet brushes by the same criteria.
Therefore, when we screened this extremely mature category we did not make detailed comparisons of one product with another and arbitrarily eliminate some products. Instead, we rejected only those products that did not fulfill the criteria.
In contrast, when it came to products whose appeal depends on ideas and styling, we emphasized the validity and functionality of the idea, the originality of expression in the materials and form, and their appropriateness. I would like to take another look at the products in Group B-1 that won Good Design Awards but gave rise to some controversy during the screening process.
First of all, some looked askance at Sharp's large liquid-crystal display television, wondering whether high price of 1.1 million yen for a 28-inch screen was justified. Even so, after some discussion, we gave it a Good Design Award on the basis of its groundbreaking technology.
In addition, many companies exhibited large-scale flat-screen home theaters, but Sanyo Electric's "HVC-36DZ1" garnered the most notice, because its wood-toned finish was of the highest quality.
Great care has been taken with the mechanical aspects of vacuum cleaners, typified by the cyclone types, which don't need a dust bag, and the exhaust-free models, and the range of variations in form and color seems to have expanded dramatically all at once. Still, we saw no proposals that clearly point the way to the vacuum cleaner of the future.
Among household products, Matsushita Electric's juicer-mixer was unanimously awarded the Gold Prize for its compact and simple design aimed at middle-aged and elderly people and persons living alone, and for the healthy, cheerful impression given by the coordination of its three colors.
Despite the abundant variety of miscellaneous household items, there was little to distinguish them, but energy-saving ideas such as the absorbent tooth brush from MUJI and the humorous fish and wave-patterned motif of the Marna toilet brush won favorable attention. The step stool "ST2" from Nikkei Products had a simple, very complete design, and it received a special prize from the Small and Medium Enterprises.
Tableware and dishes did not show as much vigor as in previous years, and they kept a low profile this year, as well, but the shallow bowl from the vernerable traditional craft workshop Hakusan Pottery earned a special prize from the Small and Medium Enterprises. In addition Hario Glass's heat-resistant glass storage containers and Toyo Glass's milk bottles earned high marks for their ease of use. The milk bottle in particular is made of lightweight glass in an energy-saving process, and in addition to being lighter than other milk bottles, it is also indented in the middle, which makes it less likely to slip out of one's hand and easier to hold. Furthermore, the addition of a plastic film has made the bottle more durable, and it has dramatically increased its performance as a returnable container. As a result, this product won the Universal Design Prize for this year.
One of the things that we saw in the course of this year's screening was the existence of entire product categories that stand out as exceptions to the overall sense of completeness in the designs of household products. We hope that manufacturers will have mainly moderate design policies.
When it comes to miscellaneous household items, Japan still lags behind the Western nations, and we have noticed that this category seems to be controlled by trends in the market. However, miscellaneous household items are the tools of everyday life, and they require slow and steady development of designs that concentrate on providing truly valuable items for the daily lives of the Japanese people.