SUMMARY OF THE ADJUDICATION

This unit covers products that individuals use in their daily lives, including everything from clocks and eyeglasses, briefcases and shoes, and stationery and grooming and beauty supplies. In fact, this unit is characterized by a diverse abundance of small products.
This time, there were 199 entries in all. The 171 entries that remained after the First Adjudication and qualified for the Second Adjudication underwent Actual Object Screening, and as a result, 103 entries, or 51.8% of all the entries in this unit, were granted the Good Design Award.
We can state that the overall quality of the product groups in this unit was high, as was the quality of the Good Design entries as a whole. As a result, a high percentage of the entries won awards. And yet, since the competition brought together an extremely wide range of product items and entries from many companies, both large and small, we saw quite a variation in the sense of completeness that the products or their designs projected. While there are completely mature product areas, such as clocks and eyeglasses, the area of welfare-related products is still in the developmental stages, and more than a few of them fail to go beyond the bounds of being a good idea incompletely realized.

However, there has been a trend in recent years for so-called "idea products" to exhibit their own autonomous kind of development related to such societal concerns as welfare and health. We therefore conducted our adjudications seriously, so as not to overlook any future possibilities that these attempts might present.
With such a mixed array of items, this Unit is one in which it is extremely difficult to devise a single set of criteria for adjudication. They also cover a wide range of prices, everything from a ballpoint pen costing 100 yen to a watch costing hundreds of thousands of yen. The members of the Screening Committee had to go from evaluating items for which image is the most important criterion, such as cosmetics bottles, to evaluating items for which function is the most important criterion, such as electric wheelchairs.

One thing that we especially careful about this time was to maintain an objective, multi-faceted point of view during the screening, which was liable to become arbitrary as the evaluation criteria varied. We expected 100-yen items to have the kind of value appropriate for a 100-yen item, and a 100,000-yen item to have the value appropriate for a 100,000-yen item. We looked for functionality in decorative or amusement-related items, and conversely, we wanted manufactured goods or products for which function was the first consideration to come equipped with a favorable image.
In order to conduct the evaluation while considering both universal and individual values, the Screening Committee discussed each one of the products in succession.

We also paid attention to delving into the intentions of the entrants. Perceiving the points that the applicant wanted evaluated from the entry documents was an important task in narrowing down the adjudication, and the contents of the documents were useful as judging criteria. The Committee members were not asked whether they liked or disliked each design. Rather, they were asked for their expert judgment on whether the entrant had intentions ahead of time, whether the intentions themselves were appropriate, and if so, whether the design was realized in line with the intentions. All Committee members were aware of these points and took care to share them.

EVALUATION OF THE DESIGNS

Among the individual products, eyeglasses accounted for a large number of exhibits, and they were plentiful and varied. Of these, the collection that Masunaga Optical Laboratories developed with Ouzak Design was of superior quality. These eyeglasses are the fruits of years of cooperation between the two companies, and one of their exhibits received Prize Of Small And Medium Enterprises. Hasegawa Optical's Air Spex had a subdued design, and yet, the honest way in which the materials were used and their simplicity won the admiration of the entire Screening Committee. The unique movement of the folding function of Mikli Japon's libellule and the typically Scandinavian design of Cottet's oga with its wooden bows, received high marks.
There were also many bags and briefcases among the entries, but most of them were combinations of either air buffer materials or nylon materials or else ABS hard-sided cases. Among these entries, the Samsonite by STARCK series from ACE caught the attention of the Committee by showing just how good an elegant cloth bag can be.
There were so few truly new proposals in the stationery department that people talked about the unique "feel" of writing with Pilot's special water gel ballpoint pens and markers. Even now, Japanese stationery products have a wonderful reputation in international markets, but we must ask ourselves why, for all the quality of their manufacture, their use of color and their graphic expression do not improve much.

Reflecting the tenor of the times, a wide range of products in this Unit has been developed for elderly people, from hearing aids to wheelchairs. While Asahi Corporation's Kaihoshugi shoes have been designed with an emphasis on their being easy to take off and put on and easy to walk in, the Committee members very much liked the way in which the designers had taken care to make the shoes look fashionable. On the other hand, the bags and hats with reflective material sewn in, developed for nighttime safety by HOKO, were a wonderful idea, but they seemed somehow incomplete as fashion items, so unfortunately, they did not qualify for a prize. Screening this category made us aware of the difficulty of designing for the elderly.

Hokkei Industries' portable color recognition device Color Talk was an outstanding example of welfare-oriented solutions. When the device touches any object, it can distinguish 220 different surface colors and announce them audibly. This product was born out of the recognition that lacking the ability to see the colors around them, visually impaired people feel anxiety about the use of colors in their daily lives. There are still some issues remaining with respect to the design, but the groundbreaking idea and the superb technology won this item the Interaction Design Prize.

The Personal Use Unit is for the multiplicity of products that surround us in our everyday lives, and the completeness and improved quality of the designs in this genre have led directly to more affluent lives for all of us. We would like to see this Unit filled with designs both feature superior workmanship and indicate that they were planned with a sense of fun.

Fumikazu Masuda
Chief Jury of Product Design Category / Unit 1
Design Producer, Open House