Shuichiro Ogawa
日本語

Notes · updated 2026-09-14

Which standard can design and new-business work actually sit on?

Work gets described in stages all the time: on a CV, in a portfolio, in a proposal, in an academic job application. List your own invented categories there and the reader has nothing to check them against.

Following a public standard is the obvious fix. In Japan, software stages mean IPA’s Common Frame, and digital talent means the Digital Skill Standard. Neither turned out to work as a basis for stages.

Common Frame 2013 is frozen

Common Frame extends ISO/IEC 12207 for Japanese industry and defines planning, requirements definition, system development, operation, and maintenance. Its planning and requirements definition processes are Japanese additions that put the earliest, vaguest part of a project into writing, which is exactly where design work lives.

It has not been revised since the 2013 edition. IPA wrote this in September 20211:

We have decided not to revise “Common Frame 2013” this time. … Consequently, “Common Frame 2013” will no longer be aligned with the latest international standard and JIS, ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207:2017 [JIS X0160:2021].

A September 2025 document repeats the policy: IPA will not revise it and will instead explain changes in the international standards2.

Citing a standard borrows authority the author does not have on their own. A document whose publisher states that it no longer aligns with the current international standard cannot lend that.

The Digital Skill Standard has no stages

Version 2.0 was published in April 2026, with six personnel types and seventeen roles3. The designer type now splits into service designer, UX/UI designer, and communication designer.

Its four building blocks are personnel types, roles, a common skill list, and learning examples. No clause defines stages or a lifecycle. The sequence “conception, implementation, hypothesis testing, post-deployment impact verification” does appear, but always prefixed with “e.g.” as illustration. The four design-process words used for designers, “understanding”, “vision”, “concept development”, and “hypothesis testing”, appear only as names inside a skill item; the main volume defines none of them.

The Digital Skill Standard says who has which skills, not how work proceeds. Reaching for it as a basis for stages misuses it.

The two standards that did hold up

What remained were international standards, each with a Japanese Industrial Standard counterpart.

Human-centred design (ISO 9241-210:2019, JIS Z 8530:2021) defines four design activities: understanding and specifying the context of use, specifying the user requirements, producing design solutions, and evaluating the design4. Principle 5.5 states that the process is iterative, so iteration is a property the standard requires rather than a style the author claims.

Innovation management (ISO 56002:2019, JIS Q 56002:2023) defines five innovation processes: identify opportunities, create concepts, validate concepts, develop solutions, and deploy solutions5. Clause 0.3 states that these processes are implemented iteratively and often in a non-linear sequence.

Laid over each other, the two cover the ground from early conception through implementation, evaluation, and operation.

StageHuman-centred designInnovation management
Planning—8.3.2 Identify opportunities
Research7.2 Understanding and specifying the context of use—
Proof of concept—8.3.4 Validate concepts
Requirements definition7.3 Specifying the user requirements—
Design7.4 Producing design solutions8.3.3 Create concepts
Implementation—8.3.5 Develop solutions
Measurement7.5 Evaluating the design—
Deployment and operation—8.3.6 Deploy solutions

The design standard alone cannot express implementation or operation, and the innovation standard alone cannot express research or requirements definition. That is the reason for using both.

Consulting and marketing

Consulting has ISO 20700:2017, guidelines for management consultancy services, whose clauses are themselves the stages of an assignment: contracting, execution, closure. It has no JIS adoption and no Japanese edition6. In a Japanese-language portfolio it can support a description of how an engagement runs, but it cannot carry the main argument.

Marketing is harder. No public standard defining the stages of marketing work as a whole could be found. Public backing exists only for research: ISO 20252 (current edition 2026, with JIS Y 20252:2019) sets service requirements for market, opinion, and social research7. Its scope excludes non-research activities such as direct marketing, which rules out advertising, brand, and demand generation.

AMA’s Marketing Competency Model, CIM’s GPMF, BABOK, and PMBOK are industry frameworks, not public standards. PMBOK is the partial exception: the standard bundled with it is an ANSI-approved American National Standard.

Nothing public defines “agile”

Short cycles of build, ship, measure, and fix invite the word agile. No public standard defines it. The sources are the 2001 Agile Manifesto and the Scrum Guide (current version November 2020), published by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland as individuals rather than by a standards body.

IPA’s ITSS+ includes an agile area, and its guide defines a sprint as a timebox of one to four weeks. The same document opens by stating that agile development has no strict rules or norms8. There is no external test of conformance to apply.

Iteration itself, however, is defensible from standard text: principle 5.5 of ISO 9241-210, clause 0.3 of ISO 56002, and the statement in ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288:2023 that the processes can be applied iteratively and concurrently. Without actually running Scrum events, writing “designed and evaluated iteratively” is both better supported and more precise than claiming agile.

How this was used

On my own portfolio, project stages were reorganised into the eight above and mapped to the two standards. The page carries a single line naming the standards; the clause numbers live in the data instead. Readers see ordinary words, and the clause-level answer is available when someone asks for it.

Requirements definition became its own stage. It had been buried inside design, which hid the fact that four of the projects involved defining requirements.

Related: design-system-practices (the same asymmetry between what is claimed and what is evidenced).

Skill names live somewhere else in the standard

The same problem returns one level down, in what the skills are called. The common skill list in Digital Skill Standard ver.2.0 has five categories, thirteen subcategories, and sixty-seven skill items9. Design is a subcategory under business transformation, and it holds nine skill items.

They are: customer, user and stakeholder understanding; value discovery and definition; digital product design; verification from the customer and user perspective; creative direction; design production work; facilitation of co-creation; experience value governance; and design process management. The last three are new in ver.2.0.

What is missing from that list is what practitioners say every day.

“Design thinking” is not a skill item. It appears exactly once in the whole common skill list, and not under design: it sits in the learning examples for creative problem solving, a personal skill. The standard treats design thinking as an individual’s way of thinking rather than as a design capability. The closest organisational counterpart is “managing the organisation with design thinking” under change management, itself new in ver.2.0.

“Service design” is not a skill item either. It appears as the role name “service designer”. Roles carve up responsibility, not skill.

“Human-centred design” never appears in the common skill list at all. The nearest words are one instance of “user-centred design” and one of “participatory design”. The central concept of the standard used above for stages is absent from Japan’s standard for talent.

There is also a question of grain. The standard carries no tool or language names. Python, BigQuery, and React appear nowhere in it. Written in standard vocabulary alone, an engineering skill set collapses into four items: front end, back end, cloud infrastructure, and SRE.

Defining design broadly

Separately from grain, the word design itself can be defined from authority, and the useful ordering is by audience rather than by rank.

The broadest Japanese public document is METI’s Design Policy Handbook 2020.

Design should now be understood as a means of value creation and problem solving that starts from people10

The handbook splits design into design as a field and design as a method, and adopts Buchanan’s Four Orders of Design as its framing of scope. For a Japanese-language self-description, this is the most usable source.

For management, there is the Design Management Declaration (METI and JPO, 2018). It calls design the act of expressing the values a company holds and its will to realise them, and reduces design management to two necessary conditions: a design officer on the management team, and design involvement from the earliest stage of business strategy.

The international definition of the profession comes from the World Design Organization.

Industrial Design is a strategic problem-solving process that drives innovation, builds business success, and leads to a better quality of life through innovative products, systems, services, and experiences11

The widest academic definition is Simon’s.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones12

The four differ in what they define. The policy handbook defines design as a means, the declaration as a management resource, WDO as a profession, and Simon as an act. Which one to cite follows from who is reading.

Open items

  • The systematic review year for ISO 20700:2017. iso.org returns 403, so this is unverified [to verify]
  • Definitive confirmation that ISO 20700 has no JIS adoption. Only the JSA listing could be checked [to verify]
  • The Japanese clause titles in JIS Z 8530:2021 and JIS Q 56002:2023. The table above translates the ISO clause titles, which may differ from the official JIS wording [to verify against the primary source]
  • Definitions and provenance for the four design-process words in Digital Skill Standard ver.2.0 [to verify]
  • An official English translation of Digital Skill Standard ver.2.0. IPA’s English edition stops at ver.1.2, so the items added in ver.2.0 have no official English [to verify]
  • The page for Simon’s definition in the first (1969) and second (1981) editions. Only the third edition, 1996, p. 111 is confirmed [to verify against the primary source]
  • The page number in Design Policy Handbook 2020 itself. The quotation is attested by Digital Skill Standard ver.2.0, p.98 [to verify]

References

Footnotes

  1. ipa.go.jp/publish/qv6pgp000000107j-att/000093137.pdf (2021-09-01), translation mine ↩

  2. ipa.go.jp/digital/kaihatsu/slcp/slcp-evolution-keypoints.html (2025-09-30) ↩

  3. ipa.go.jp/jinzai/skill-standard/dss/index.html (main volume: dss_ver2.0.pdf) ↩

  4. ISO 9241-210:2019 clause 7. JIS Z 8530:2021 is a modified adoption ↩

  5. ISO 56002:2019 clause 8.3. ISO 56001:2024 sits above it as certifiable requirements ↩

  6. The JSA listing states “Japanese edition: none” and records no corresponding JIS ↩

  7. ISO 20252:2026 (fourth edition, 2026-09, ISO/TC 225). The 2019 edition is withdrawn ↩

  8. ipa.go.jp/jinzai/skill-standard/plus-it-ui/itssplus/agile.html (guide, May 2024 edition) ↩

  9. The common skill list spreadsheet is the authoritative form. ipa.go.jp/jinzai/skill-standard/dss/download.html ↩

  10. Quoted with attribution in Digital Skill Standard ver.2.0, p.98; translation mine ↩

  11. Renewed at the 29th General Assembly, Gwangju, 2015. wdo.org/about/definition/ ↩

  12. Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd ed., MIT Press, 1996, p. 111 ↩

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