Here they talk about the Grand Prix winners in the categories they judged and what made each so special, and share their unique insights as jury members. In the Mobile category, entries like " Hungerithm " and " Like My Addiction " that took the mobile platform to a new level received high marks, as did entries like " Google Home of the Whopper " and " Kiss the Kremlin " that boldly tried things that had never been attempted before on the platform.
It was praised as extremely courageous in that it initiated a new conversation about the issue of infertility and gender roles. My fellow jury members said they looked forward to seeing more such bold, surprising creations come out of Japan.
Let's hope we can live up to their expectations. The jury included an architect, a product designer, a researcher, an engineer, and a university professor; I was the only one with an agency background. In our deliberations all of us were motivated solely by the desire to identify the best entries. When doubts arose about an entry, we would immediately investigate and discuss the question exhaustively.
And if someone was skeptical about a product's functions, we would analyze the design and even take it apart. Thus the judging process was totally professional and fair. Traditional items that simply had an attractive design fell by the wayside; the clincher was whether the product had enough impact to change society, along with its scalability.
The keyword in the newly established entertainment category is "audience first. It's important that it aim to make the audience glad to have spent time on it, eager to see or experience it again, and ultimately willing to fork out money to do so.
