Sony shows off its vision of the future at Milan Furniture Fair

Visitors to the very chic International Furniture Fair in Milan have been able to see, and hear, what Sony thinks might be the future of interior design.  The aim of their exhibit is to show what the home of the future might look like, with high-tech products merging seamlessly with the rest of the furniture.

Back to the future

This avant-garde approach is surprising and unexpected from the electronics giant, which predicts that new technologies will become ever-more integrated with their environment and their users.  Encouraged by the success of its latest range of monolithic TVs, the Japanese brand is hoping to take the concept further by offering visitors to the Fair a view of what the future of the modern home could be.  'Today, we have our monolithic TVs, which are already a turning point.  But tomorrow, we will be able to bring you all of this,' promised Takuya Tak'Kawagoi, the head of Sony's London Design Centre as he unveiled the exhibition's catalogue.

Monolithic: two years in the making


The team at the Sony Design Centre invited well-known London designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby to collaborate in the experiment, which is a careful mixture of minimalism and elegance.  According to Kaz Ichikawa, another of Sony's designers, 'it's been two years since the monolithic concept was born, and it took a long time for us to be able bring sound, pictures and light in such a thin television.'  That's mostly thanks to the LED backlighting.  Not only does this technology reduce the energy consumption, it also allows manufacturers to slim TVs down to a strict minimum.


Essential

Sticking to the essentials was a key part of the design process for Sony, which explains how style and technology have been so perfectly married in their Milan exhibition.  Walking into the huge dark space dotted with points of light and lined with foam pyramids is a little bit like walking into a bubble.  The outside world seems a long way off, and the sounds of the city disappear to leave nothing but a perfect silence, occasionally interrupted by a few bars of electronic music or the sound of running water.  There's nothing there that doesn't need to be. 


Making things easier

For some in the world of high-tech, design is a dirty word, sometimes relegated to a simple piece of marketing speak used to refer to a single product.  Fortunately though, technological innovations have allowed manufacturers to develop equipment that is much more tightly integrated with its environment.  But will these objects, our everyday digital tools, ever end up going unnoticed?  If they fade into the interior design, or better still, become decorative objects in their own right, then that dream could well become reality.


That's what Sony was trying to show with its stand in Milan, an experiment involving sound, light and pictures that all played with our expectations to come together in new unusual ways.  One example is these tube-based speakers that were already on show in Milan back in 2007 and which now take centre-stage.


All the way through our visit, we could only thing of one thing: we can't wait!

> Buyer's Guides: Our Pick of The Best Products