How do people
in the world feel right now?

What role does CMF play in Sony Design? What kind of content goes into the CMF Framework, and how do designers create it?

TakumaCMF determines the first impression the product makes. It has emotional value for users, too, which makes it an extremely important element for Sony Design. The thing, though, is that the value changes depending on context and social background. A color or material that looks elegant in one setting can come off looking bad in another; we need to observe consumers all the time to know how things are going to come across. One way we do that is through our Design Vision Project, an annual project where we comprehensively research worldwide trends. Another initiative focuses on CMF-specific research, which delves further into consumers and drills down to deeper psychological levels to understand how people in the world are feeling right now.

The goals of the research project are twofold. First, instead of focusing on what’s new on the surface, we take a top-down view of trends from the past few years and concentrate on the fundamental seeds of change that could sprout into new trends. The second goal is to probe the subtle changes that appear in different cultures and communications worldwide when global trends make their way down to the local level. For us, the most important thing was that the designers doing the actual work would take charge of the project, travel to the actual locations, and experience things firsthand. The background informing that approach is the Sony Design creed: only what you grasp for yourself has original value.
Click here for the article on the Design Vision Project 〉

RikkeWe call this research project the "City Safari." As the name suggests, the designers on the project travel through cities around the world like hunters, more or less: sharpening their sense of smell, closely observing cities and residents, and tracking down the faintest breaths of change. The results help us decipher the consumer’s state of mind, which we base the CMF Framework on.

The CMF Framework consists of keywords, visuals, color palettes, and sample materials that foresee what could lie ahead. At first, the framework served to unify Sony's brands and guide CMF for future products. In recent years, though, people have started to realize that the Framework can also be a predictor from a design point of view. We’ve gotten comments from people in other departments, like space design, saying that the clues in the Framework have generated new ideas. For this year’s project, then, we decided to go a step further and challenge ourselves to make a CMF Framework that’d inspire creativity across the whole Sony Design landscape.

MuraiThe first thing we changed was the team structure. Teams used to consist mainly of designers from the CMF and Product Design departments, but this time we added members from the User Interface (UI) and Communication Design (CD) departments. That came out of our aim to broaden the scope of the Framework: by incorporating viewpoints and sensitivities from other departments, we figured we could make the Framework more applicable in more areas.

We wanted to make our work as effective and pertinent as possible, too, so all the members went to their design departments and related business departments and asked questions: what business issues they were facing and what they expected from CMF, for example. After doing that legwork, they came back and shared their findings with the rest of the group. Then, we got to work on careful simulations of the research we’d need to perform. When everything was ready to go, we headed out to cities around the world on our "City Safari" in search of new trends—and also to gauge whether our current CMF direction was right or not.

Sensing changes in the air
all around the world

This City Safari took place in three cities: Shanghai, London, and New York. Project members broke into teams, explored their city, and did field research. Their trips sparked a variety of emotions and discoveries alike.

Bouncing ideas off each other
to find true insights

After exploring Shanghai, London, and New York, the teams assembled in Tokyo and worked together on creating the ideal CMF Framework out of their findings. How exactly did that process work?

MuraiIt takes more than just compiling the results of all the teams’ research to make a CMF Framework. What we were aiming for wasn't just a report—we wanted a framework that other designers could look at to jolt their creativity. We also got a lot out of integrating our findings with other resources; new truths came to light when we combined the teams’ findings with the viewpoints of other designers. That’s why we hold workshops and use the research results as "ingredients," so to speak, that mingle together to create fuller, truer insights.

During the workshops, the members spread photos of the inspiring buildings and scenery they saw in their cities, along with interesting handicrafts, material samples and textile they'd picked up. Taking everything in, we discussed our reactions and bounced ideas off each other. When we looked at the handmade crafts the London team brought back, for example, the Shanghai team tied what they saw into their own findings—they spoke about the lifestyle store that used the repurposed Ming Dynasty building. That got us talking about the deepest psyche of the consumer, talking about how people today might be seeking out craftsmanship that brings out the best in the materials themselves.

The CMF Framework
will continue to evolve

How do the members feel after being involved in this project? And what is their outlook for the future?

KimuraTaking part in this project for the first time as a UI designer brought me into a new realization of how important CMF is—and it gave me hints on how to further improve UI design. I design smartphone UI, and, as a lot of us know, smartphone users often obsess over the color and appearance of the products they use. That's a big reason why we always focus on CMF. Now, though, I realize there's even more we can do. Smartphones can use video wallpapers, for example, so we could express our CMF worldview in the form of a video. We've already started working on prototypes along those lines.

KanadaThe project was eye-opening for me, too. The standard method in communication design has generally been to take the product concept as a starting point for ideas and then design the key visuals, promotional movies, and space design for reveal events around that core concept to convey the message to users. What the new CMF Framework does is open up new avenues for connection, I think. If we use the Framework's insights into the consumer psyche as a starting point instead, we might be able to create visuals and messages that resonate even more deeply with our audiences. I'd like to use CMF as a new standpoint for pursuing captivating potential in CD.