Roundtable:

The year 2009 marked the 50th anniversary of the founding the Japan Society of Design. In 1962, the Journal of the Japan Society of Design started. It is one of the first academic journals to examine design history and theory in the world. Major part of a booklet celebrating the anniversary is a catalogue of the articles published in the journal during 1962-2009. Although the society deals with the whole aspects of design, it is a fact that a large proportion of papers published there is design history, and this tendency is strong from a certain point of time. Therefore, the catalogue could be an indicator of design history studies in Japan during the decades of 1960s - 2000s. It was in 1989 when the journal started carrying English abstracts. The globalization of studies in design history in Japan started in the late 1980s and it was at full swing in the 2000s. Extra special efforts are needed to publish papers in Western languages, while keeping the academic level of original papers written in Japanese. The Japan Society of Design, jointed with the Japanese Society for the Science of Design, Design History Forum, and Design History Workshop Japan, supported the 6th ICDHS held in Osaka in 2008. It was meaningful that the first academic meeting of the ICDHS in Asia was held in Western Japan where design is active not only in practice but also in research. These events symbolize today’s situation of those societies. On the one hand, it is a time of globalization. On the other, it is also a time of self-identification or movement toward a community, which does not mean a local community but a community of design history and studies. Any society of design tends to be caught up in the currents of the day such as business or trend. The Japan Society of Design is, however, a society that is slowly growing even after 50 years. The Encyclopedia of Asian Design for which many members of these societies are now working together may be the next step toward its real globalization