ABOUT
The positioning of this theater for design advocacy in society depends on the circumstances of the advocating institution and the background conditions at the time. When design advocacy began in Japan, the answer was quite straightforward. Japan had few resources, if any, beyond human capital. Highly competitive products needed to be built and exported for economic survival. Product design was required as a specification. Designers were sent to manufacturers who could produce export goods, training seminars for business owners and product developers took hold, and design competitions found their place. Early subjects of design advocacy employed these tactics to enhance the design competency of export businesses.
Around 100 years ago, the exports of Japan consisted of chinaware and textiles. After the Second World War, industrial products took the main stage, and exports followed a trajectory beginning with discretionary enthusiast's goods like cameras, moving into home electronics and automobiles, broadening to machine tools, construction equipment, computers, and systems, and eventually encompassing service models in the ensuing decades. The ceaseless evolution of principal export products led to design taking a role in nearly every industry generating products and services. Not only did the number of designers increase, but the professional design competency among business owners, engineers, and sales executives-as a result of designers' cumulative output-improved. In effect, a corporate capacity for continual creation of high-quality goods and services was nurtured.
Systematic design advocacy in Japan began in the latter half of the 1950s. At that time, administrative and advocacy measures, such as the Good Design Awards, were organized, and the institution to advocate design was established. Promotion to the consumer was another subject that was addressed in this early period. The thinking that superior goods and services would not arrive on the scene without competency for selection among consumers prevailed since the early days of modern design. Yet, as also found to be true in Japan, a promotion effort that put consumers lower in the sequence of importance met without success.
The transformation of consumer awareness, in fact, did not result from promotion policy, but gradually advanced through market logic, i.e., the purchase and sale of goods and services. The design of a product or service provided an opportunity for the consumer to reflect on one's lifestyle. Support of the product or service meant commercial success, which consequently signaled industry to alter its course. This process was clearly not linear progression, but filled with digression. Nonetheless, the quality of life and society unmistakably improved contemporaneously with the quality of products and services offered by industry through a medium called design. In other words, promotion policy previously erred in identifying industry and consumers as distinct targets. To fix this, the Good Design Awards, which stood at the core of Japan's design promotion policy, assumed a role as a device that began generating favorable cycles between industry and consumers.
From 1990 onward, consumer awareness started to change radically. People began to realize that no template could apply to multiple individuals, and that individuals had to develop their own lifestyles. When this thinking ran its course, many consumers embraced design; they needed it. Today, we find that awareness of the Good Design Awards has reached 87%, a fact that speaks loudly to the trust consumers in Japan place with design. Although in many ways simply an associated consequence, design in Japan succeeded in educating highly design-conscious consumers, I believe.