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The dawn of the 21st century has brought us the 45th annual Good
Design Award, and I have undertaken the major role of Chairman of
the Jury Committee. As of next year, I shall have been a designer
for 30 years, and for half of those years, I have served as a member
of the Good Design Award Screening Committee. I have had the experience
of working as an in-house designer, and during those days, I was
desperate to earn the coveted G-Mark. As a regional designer, I
have been involved with traditional crafts and local industries,
and in those areas, the evaluation criteria for the Good Design
Award served as a major pillar of design principles for me when
I worked as a consultant for product centers and small and medium
companies. That is because I understood better than anyone what
it meant to receive the G-Mark.
When I look at the circumstances under which entries were submitted,
I find, for example, that at some companies, they were planning
to submit nearly 50 entries, but were forced to cut the number in
half due to instructions from the management strategists. Other
companies, primarily small and medium ones, wanted to make use of
good design as a means of having their activities recognized. Indeed,
there truly were many kinds of entries.
My aim was to follow up on the New Frontier Design Category, set
up two years ago, by creating a new division called the Communication
Design Category. The domain of design cannot be limited to the mere
color or shape of a product or to proposals for everyday life. Instead,
we decided to try to incorporate concepts of how design as an effort,
design as interpersonal communication, and design as visual communication
should look.
As a result, design has already gone beyond notions of the "shapes
of things." Financial systems, a new investment product called the
Private Finance Initiative, a new day care center called the Community
School, construction environment systems put together in new ways
such as the Sendai Mediatheque; the Oedo Line of the Eidan Subway,
which has redesigned the traditional concept of "station," and even
television programs have elements of design. What we would like
users to learn from the Good Design Awards is that design is the
one and only means of turning idealism into reality, and I would
like them to understand design as an expression of human knowledge
and awareness.
Under the adjudication guidelines for this year, we approached
the adjudication after a preliminary seminar for the Jury Committee
members, especially the new ones, on the question of how we could
commit ourselves to the perspectives of both the professional designer
and the user. I wanted the Jury Committee members once again to
make themselves aware of the question of how the screening for the
Good Design Award affects society or how large the functional effect
of design is. We conducted this screening with our strategic focus
on a timely passing of the torch to the next generation of designers
who will eventually form the core group for adjudication of the
Good Design Award.
As we can see from previous Good Design Award adjudication, Japanese
society has a tendency to allow the same old people to continue
occupying positions, but design, or, in other words, its background,
economy, and culture are transformed as time goes on. I believe
that value systems should be different for different eras, and that
screening during different eras should be conducted by designers,
design journalists, and design-related people who represent that
era. Furthermore, given the fact that Japan is a country built upon
international trade, Good Design Award should become the true wellspring
of its prosperity. This has been my firm conviction as I have served
as Chairman of the Jury Committee.
I myself am a user of design. In particular, at the age of 28,
I was forced to begin life in a wheelchair, and ever since that
time, I have been able to offer a user's opinion of products representing
universal design. I can also express opinions on physiological matters
from the point of view as a doctor.
I am also an educator fostering the development of the next generation
of designers, and in connection with that, I approached the screening
with the idea of creating model cases that would seem like Good
Design to the young designers and students who have their eyes on
the future, and at the same time, letting people know what a wide
domain design covers.
As far as the entries are concerned, we can assume that people
who enter products for the Good Design Award all want to receive
it. To that extent, members of the Jury Committee actually feel
that they are being cruel when they make the decision not to pass
an entry. If an entry created with such enthusiasm and passion does
not pass, there must be an individual reason, so it is extremely
important to provide clear feedback about those reasons. Even for
award winners, the process is meaningless if it ends with just the
awarding of the prize. I would like to improve matters by completing
the Good Design Award process with feedback, adding such comments
of how and where jury would expect some improvement.
The award winners have been selected on the basis of extremely objective
facts, and their status as representatives of good design has been
confirmed. Note, however, that if we screened entries by reducing
points for anything that was not perfect, I can estimate that the
number selected would fall below 20%. However, if we screen entries
by adding points, in other words, by looking for their good points,
the selection rate will probably exceed 70%. In such cases, it all
boils down to the question of whether a given entry is truly worth
an award.
Then we also had the task force members, that is, the veteran Jury
Committee members and those members who had a fully developed professional
perspective on creating things, conduct a second inspection of the
entries screened in all the divisions and units. Apparently there
seemed to be some rumor among the jury members to the effect that
in one sense, that I might have been exercising my authority as
the Chair. However, I took it upon myself to assume the perspective
of a true professional and the perspective of a user once more and
conduct a second investigation.
The question arises of whether products that are selling well now
are examples of good design. For example, mobile phones include
models that have been designed with no regard for suggestions from
human engineering, and it has become commonplace to see circumstances
in which products must be created according to the concepts offered
by so-called career executives instead of the proposals offered
by designers. We now have the phenomenon of products which ought
to be evolving actually becoming harder to use at each stage.
Another point is that if we look at things from the major perspective
of marketing, there are now stores that sell large volumes of goods
at low prices everywhere one goes, but on the other hand, another
marketing pattern is selling things at exclusive shops. The products
that come onto the scene in this kind of environment certainly include
those with lower production cost and correspondingly lower quality,
and the number of choices has increased. But I am really worried
about this phenomenon leading to Japan's entire production and consumption
structure taking on a monotonous uniformity. While new patterns
of marketing exist, when I consider the question of whether the
consumption structure has really changed, I sometimes even come
to the conclusion that it has not diversified in the least. This
aspect of the economy will become clear to you if you take a good
look at the products chosen for this year's Good Design Award.
Finally, this year I asked each of the 63 members of the Jury Committee
to name the one entry that they thought was the best. I am thinking
of eventually compiling these opinions into a pamphlet. This would
make each jury member's sense of values clear, and convey to more
people an idea of the individuality of each Jury Committee member,
or what kind of views, information, and awareness played a role
in the screening.
This 45th year of the Good Design Award marks the celebration of
the milestone immediately preceding the ceremony that will celebrate
our 50th anniversary. We hoped that from now on, the Good Design
Award would be considered a celebration of our 45th year, so that
on its 50th anniversary, we could have a ceremony showing the role
that design has played in creating Japan as a country founded on
trade. In that sense, I hope that you will highly pay attention
to what will be chosen for the Grand Prix during the final deliberations.
Having chosen to function as a designer, I am determined to use
the Good Design Award as a means of expressing the idea that Japan's
true affluence would have been impossible without design.
Today, Japan's economy is stagnant, and given the recent problems
with terrorism, the world situation has become very unstable. It
is a fact that the role that design plays in Japan's craftsmanship
is in extremely harsh circumstances within companies.
However, I will be delighted if you leave this venue having gained
from the Good Design Award the idea that design is by no means a
powerless force in our society and economy.
Kazuo Kawasaki
Chairman of the Jury
Nagoya City University, Graduate School of Design & Architecture
Professor/ Ph.D.(Medical Science)
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