Asia's Most Authoritative Design Award Has Named Its Winners. Here's What a Good Idea Looked Like This Year

It's also the broadest and most meaningful of the big design prizes: more than "good looks," it cares about a design's value to society.

On November 1, Japan's GOOD DESIGN AWARD, the most authoritative prize in Asian design, published its full list of 2017 winners.

The GOOD DESIGN AWARD grew out of the "Good Design Product Selection System," also known as the G-Mark, set up in 1957 by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (now the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry). It considers every field of design and picks roughly 1,200 outstanding products a year; over sixty years it has honored about 44,000 winners in all.

The award's standing in Asia has only grown. From 2008 on, Thailand, India, Singapore and other countries adopted it in turn. To this day, a product carrying that distinctive "G" still means "good design" and "high quality" — and gives the company selling it something to talk about.

The award's influence runs deep, and the award itself has kept changing along with Japanese society. It was founded just as Japan was waking up to the idea of "design," and at first it did not invite entries at all: the judges had to walk the streets themselves and find the good things. Later, as the Japanese economy took off, the standard became "good design for export." The range of what could be entered kept widening too, taking in industrial goods, electronics, high-tech products of the internet age, and the durable, long-selling items chosen by popular vote.

From home appliances and cars to houses and buildings, from service design, apps and PR projects to the communication design behind regional revival, and on to business models — the entries are wildly varied, and each year the designs stamped with the G mark are too many to list. Unlike other design prizes, this one starts from "good design that can guide how society develops": it weighs not only whether a design is handsome and sensible, but the process behind it and what it means in the real world.

Entries open every April, pass through a first and a second round of judging, and lead to an exhibition and awards ceremony in November; a yearbook of the winners is published the following March. The whole process takes close to a year.

This year the award received 4,495 entries from 985 companies and individuals, and 1,428 designs were chosen. Twenty-five of them were not new work at all, but long-lived designs that users still love. We've picked out some of the more notable ones, so you can see what Japan — and the world — is thinking about right now, and how design is pushing society forward.

Grand Award

The Good Design Award defines the Grand Award as the entry that stands out above all the rest, the one that can improve the most people's lives.

This year it went to the Venova, developed by Yamaha: a small, approachable instrument that a beginner can pick up quickly. It has a distinctive "branching pipe" and "serpentine structure," is made of washable resin, and weighs just 180 grams — as easy to carry and play as a recorder, but with a tone close to a saxophone.

The Venova won, the judges said, because "it didn't simply redesign the surface of an instrument; it created an entirely new one."

Gold Award

The Gold Award puts more weight on what a design does about a social problem. Nineteen winners were chosen this year, more than half of them industrial design. Sony took awards for its wireless noise-canceling headphones, its OLED 4K TV, and its Xperia Touch smart projector. Xiaomi's Smartmi air conditioner, which went on sale this past August, was picked for its "upmarket minimalist design and Bluetooth control." The Tesla Model X, the all-electric SUV that only reached Japan in 2016, made the list as well.

So did the Japanese bestseller we've written about before, the one that gets children laughing while they learn, Poop Kanji Fill-in-the-Blanks (《便便汉字填空》), praised as "a revolutionary book for the way Japanese elementary schoolers learn kanji." A rechargeable earbud-style hearing aid from Panasonic — drop it in its case to charge, and you never change a battery — was chosen for its ease of use.

A few other winners are distinctly Japanese. Take a look:

The Nikkei's digital news site

In Japan, where print newspapers still dominate, the move to new media has been slow. This year the Nikkei took the lead with a brand-new digital news site that mixes VR, animation, JavaScript and other techniques, trying to make news visual and to give readers data journalism that is fuller, rounder and easier to read.

Take a Nikkei piece published on October 30, Where Do Visitors to Japan Go? What Do They Buy? (《访日客去哪儿？买什么》). It draws on the Japan Tourism Agency's figures for the number of foreign visitors and its survey of what those visitors spend. Sorted by growth curves, spending amounts, spending categories and so on, the data becomes a set of plain, easy-to-follow charts; with a navigation menu down the left side, the whole page can be taken in at a glance.

The award's judging panel called it "a distinctly Japanese approach to data journalism, and one to look forward to."

Takata Higashi Junior High School, Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture

Care for people is a running theme of this award. Six years have passed since Japan's March 11 earthquake, but the rebuilding is far from over, and reconstruction projects in the disaster zone have turned up on the winners' list again and again.

Rikuzentakata Municipal Takata Higashi Junior High School is a new building put up after the Great East Japan Earthquake, merging three damaged schools into one. It was moved to high ground near the old site, where the natural slope shapes a two-story building that is open and layered. It is more than a school: it is also where local residents gather. So alongside the usual classrooms, Takata Higashi built a library, multipurpose rooms and workshops open to the townspeople.

SEND

In Japan, "not knowing which products will sell" and "working harder doesn't pay more" are two big reasons farmers, herders and fishers leave the business. Distribution still sits at the center of the whole agricultural trade, and producers take only a third of the retail price as profit. Large middlemen tend to buy in bulk regardless of actual demand, which wastes food and pushes the burden back onto producers.

SEND is a distribution platform built to keep agricultural producers producing; its mission is to "build a mechanism that connects producers and consumers." It uses data analysis to forecast demand, trying to close the information gap and the time lag between supply and demand in farming, livestock and fisheries. On SEND, consumers order whenever they need to and get a steady supply of small quantities across many varieties. Producers use SEND's demand forecasts to plan output and ship in batches, making the trade efficient.

Two years after it started, SEND had built a network of more than 4,000 producers and 3,200 restaurants across Japan. That, plus delivery staff who offer surplus vegetables to customers as they make their rounds, has held product loss on the platform below 1%.

Special Award

The Special Award covers four themes: Future Making, Thing Making, Regional Making and Reconstruction Design.

"Future Making" had six winners this time, each offering a new answer to the question of how to build a better society. SoftBank, for one, introduced a new employment scheme for people with disabilities in May of last year. Under it, people who find long hours difficult can sign contracts for fewer than 20 hours a week. This short-hour arrangement draws on labor that would otherwise go unused, helps people with disabilities into work, and pushes toward a society where "anyone can hold a job."

Another winner: the automotive 4K screen Panasonic unveiled late last year, mounted where the instrument panel sits. It is not yet in real use, but the thinking behind it counts as "creating the future." The technology replaces side and rearview mirrors with high-definition displays, doing away with mirrors altogether, and the screen can show driver-assistance information such as lane changes. It gives older drivers a clearer, fuller view of the road, and it frees car design from the constraints of a conventional body.

Yamaha's method of teaching music also won a "Future Making" award, judged a new approach that breaks the traditional classroom model and deserves to spread. It is built around VOCALOID for Education, an upgraded version of VOCALOID, the electronic voice-synthesis software that appeared in 2003.

VOCALOID for Education came out of a simple fact: over Japan's nine years of compulsory schooling, fewer and fewer students end up liking music. Made for the music classroom, the software tries to move past lessons that teach only playing and singing technique, and to lead students to study on their own and fall in love with music for themselves.

It runs on computers and tablets and is easy to work. With a teacher's guidance, students write what they want to say as lyrics; VOCALOID sets the lyrics to a melody; the students then sing it, and VOCALOID records the result for them to post online.

"Thing Making" is the redesign of things that already exist, a new way of thinking about ordinary objects. Bace's minimal chocolate, for example, sets out to "renew chocolate" and to connect the people who eat it with the people who grow the cacao. It comes in a resealable pouch carrying colorful little cards, each printed with the cacao's growing region, its flavor and so on. Terada Electric Manufacturing designed a pop-up power outlet that disappears when it isn't in use and turns 90 degrees when it needs to.

B's Gyozenji, a social welfare facility in Hakusan, Ishikawa Prefecture, is one of the winners under "Regional Making." The complex serves every resident of the surrounding area and holds a nursery, a day-care center for the elderly, rehabilitation for people with disabilities and an internal medicine clinic, plus a natural hot spring, a restaurant, a pool and a flower shop. It is regarded as a fine example of how to build a community center in a thinly populated part of Japan: it broke down the walls between conventional facilities, bringing many social functions together for the first time, and became the center of daily life in the town.

"Reconstruction Design" is mostly about design tied to Japan's earthquakes. Six years after March 11, to keep people mindful of disaster, Hakuhodo designed an enormous billboard for Yahoo Japan on the facade of the Sony Building in Ginza, Tokyo. Most of it is black type on white, carrying Yahoo's corporate stance and its message about preparedness; at 16.7 meters above the ground, a line marked in bold red reads "right at this height" — the height of the tsunami observed in Ofunato, Iwate Prefecture, during the earthquake — asking passersby to imagine the moment it struck.

Images from: GOOD DESIGN AWARD