Yasuo Kuroki passed away on July 12, 2007, but his contributions to Sony design will always be remembered.
I was watching TV the other day, and when they switched to footage from overseas, I caught a glimpse of a Sony product in a corner of the scene. It was the BRAVIA "X Series" / "XBR Series". Even if we can't see the manufacturer or brand logo, it's easy to know something is a Sony product. In a flash, it conveys something distinctively "Sony." There's a definite product identity, and that's what I would call Sony design.
But we couldn't break this essence down to a set of rules. It's truly hard to create, maintain, and nurture a sense of style that can't be spelled out. And I think this highlights the importance of design management, which is exactly what I focused on at Sony. It seemed as if we were always saying at design meetings, "Hey, doesn't this look like that other company's?" or "I think I've seen this somewhere." Those designs were obviously scrapped. Even if we were on the verge of production when a competitor beat us to market with a similar product, we accepted the circumstances and stopped. This kind of dedication, over and over, gradually created something uniquely "Sony," an identity.
I've contributed to many products, including Walkman, Profeel and Jumbotron, but others were actually involved in the design. It would be more accurate to say I set the scene for their work and supported them. As I recall, the environment for design at Sony was fundamentally different, starting with how our office was organized. Masaru Ibuka (then honorary chairman of Sony) and Akio Morita (then chairman) worked on the seventh floor, and I joined Norio Ohga (then president) on the sixth. Directly below us was design. Not finance. Not engineering. Designers were the group closest to the top. It was enough to prompt some journalist to say that what inspired one interesting Sony product after another was the fact that it wasn't engineers or planners who were at the heart of the company, it was designers.
Even then, Sony was introducing about 600 new products a year, including components. It would have been unreasonable to expect the top management to have a firm grasp of everything, to know how each product reflected Sony design. Instead, we selected strategic products and offered opportunities for the developers to give presentations to top management. But even then, the executives found themselves on the design floor. Ordinarily, they would have been approached in the boardroom, but I was always inviting the executives down. Products can't move by themselves, but Ibuka and Morita had serviceable legs, I said. And I got a thorough scolding from the old guard, but these two gladly came down for a look. After all, it must be much more enjoyable to see things in person than to endure a board meeting. What Ibuka and Morita were shown were design mock-ups. But these were not rough models; they were quite attractive. They served as our ultimate goal, and we combined the talents of designers and engineers to make it happen. In this approach to product development, I think Sony was unique among Japanese manufacturers at the time.
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