Good Design Award 2026 Exhibition Opens at Tokyo Midtown

The G Exhibition, the showcase for this year's Good Design Award winners, is running at Tokyo Midtown near Roppongi Station from October 31 to November 4, 2026. Admission is free.

Around 1,500 award-winning designs, selected from 5,111 entries, are on display. They span gadgets, packaging, kitchenware and cosmetics, and the show is held together by a shared idea of good design. The first thing visitors see is Yamaha's EAD50, a drum expansion module with a dedicated microphone. It took this year's Grand Award. Judges weighed its fit with this year's theme, whether a design contributes to a vision, along with its rationality and beauty.

Standouts across categories

Chuo Seiki's ONE-LOOP thermoacoustic cooling system converts heat into sound waves to produce cooling. The company made the unit compact, which addresses the large installation space such systems have needed. At the small end is KODAK's CHARMERA, a keychain-style digital toy camera.

Other winners include a Sanwa Direct power strip that accepts plugs in any orientation, and Sugahara Glass's "Imperfect" glass. The glass uses material that did not melt fully, a result of a temporary shortage of an additive. YFY Packaging of Taiwan designed a cat food package whose side panel works as a scratching surface. In gadgets, the iGame MINI RTX 50 series offers one of the smallest RTX 5070 cards for Mini-ITX builds, and the Toucan Keyboard is a split keyboard with Piantor layout and a trackpad.

Also shown are Askul's alkaline battery packaging, which makes AA and AAA types easy to tell apart, and the Strata footrest, which supports the feet dynamically like a rocking chair. KITZ's valve handle, the Kiku Handle, also won the 2026 Good Design Long Life Design Award. The CICO Mini wireless folding fan and panels explaining housing and office spatial design round out the show.

Public and jury views differ

A sticker poll at the exit lets visitors pick their own favorites. Shortly after opening, the EAD50 had zero votes, a sign that jury and public taste can diverge, or that drums are simply a niche.

This year's emphasis on design that serves a vision means fewer obviously product-centered entries than last year, according to the exhibition's observers. The show also includes a souvenir pop-up store and a Hiroshima Good Design Award display.