Director’s Comment

We take action as unique individuals among a plurality of others. Both in limiting working hours to improve labor and in somehow capitalizing on each person's abilities in diverse work, we see a respect for individuals, who are unlike any other individual. In both efforts, working is essentially viewed as our reason for being. From this conceptual basis, both goals seek the same future.

Director’s Comment

Before we can nurture the kind of creativity behind innovation and solutions to social issues, we should ask ourselves what creativity is all About. By no means is creativity limited to the ability to express ourselves well. We should not equate creativity with drawing or writing well, for example. Nor should we equate creativity with originality or eccentricity. Instead, I see four aspects of creativity: artistic expression, hypothesizing(abduction), problem-solving, and empathy/self-reference.

Director’s Comment

When considering the matter of cultivating local communities, we can distill the concept of locality down to things that set an area apart. It is deceptively difficult to cultivate or extend this distinctiveness, which consists in the small-scale consensus of local groups, is intertwined with local economic interests, and is in a constant state of flux.

Surveying examples of design in the award program from this perspective, we can discern a few key concepts. One is a middle ground, whether between beauty and diversity, business and volunteering, public and private, and so on. This middle ground brings together aspects of what we want and what actually exists in the everyday world. Specifically, a significant theme is how well design work integrates and reflects the will of the people on a small scale.

Director’s Comment

In the program this year, the focused issue under my direction was "Development of Social Infrastructure." We must be especially careful About the word "development." In Japanese, this word also refers to evolution in natural history, but what we mean is the result of random adaptation to random environmental changes, not purposive at all. Given the nature of selective pressure in the market, attempting to gain a comprehensive understanding of industry and design inevitably devolves into the nihilism of "whatever happens, happens." Thus, as the result of natural evolutionary history ourselves, we must be careful About the variable of our "intentionality" when discussing social development. In other words, beyond future predictions accounting for the big-picture view of how society will develop, we must also discuss design-related hopes based on a clear determination of how we wish to develop society.

Director’s Comment

We can interpret a "lifestyle" as being the lived experience that contributes to a contented life—the sum of all the satisfying moments we have, and a measure of our quality of life.

Seemingly inevitable, trends toward tomorrow's digital society will accelerate, and in Japan, where the population is declining and labor shortages can be offset by AI, robots, and similar innovation, it will be a key challenge to build a society where people coexist with these things.

However, we face serious social issues in this digital society, such as a lack of humanity or the loss of real human ties in our families or communities. Finding solutions—the legacy we leave for our children—is our profound responsibility.

Director’s Comment

On this broad topic, we will restrict the scope of this essay to social harmony. To explore how effective design can help toward this end, we can classify notable winners this year into three approaches they take.

Director’s Comment

No one would doubt that advanced technology is new, freshly invented technology. However, a few points should be clarified, such as what is new About it, how new is it, and from whose per-spective is it new.

As for where the truly advanced technology is, it is used and tested at universities, institutes, and other special settings in the long-term pursuit of fundamental scientific truths and R&D, inacces-sible to all but a select few. This kind of advanced technology is the focus of this essay.

Director’s Comment

As society grows more diverse and complex, what sense of security can we hope to find? Society itself is a kind of system, made up of people. When considering design that makes us feel secure, it is therefore useful to take the academic or research perspective of systems engineering.

Systems, whether physical or conceptual, consist of various elements or factors that are interconnected. This interconnectedness makes systems valuable and useful to us. One important way social systems benefit the people in them is by providing a sense of security.

To foster security in society, social systems must be designed appropriately. Specifically, the elements needed for a reassuring social system and the connections between them must be well designed.