How Japan’s forgotten past can stop IoT’s dystopian future

Technology is global, but ideas are local.

The same IoT technology is being deployed all over the world, but a small Japanese startup might be who helps us make sense of it all.

There is amazing work being done in user experience design, but most designers are operating with the contract of keeping users engaged. This is a fundamental shift from the traditional user-centered and functional design approaches.

Today we sit down with Kaz Oki, founder of Mui Lab, and we talk about user design can actually improve our lives and help us disengage.

We also talk about the challenges of getting VCs to invest in hardware startups, why Kyoto might be Japan's next innovation hub, and what it takes for a startup to successfully spin out of a Japanese company

It's a great discussion, and I think you will really enjoy it.

Show Notes

How Japanese design philosophy informs user interface design How UI design got so bad Who are the early technology adopters in Japan Why VCs hesitate to invest in hardware companies How to pitch corporate management to let you spin out a startup Why you should run a Kickstarter even when you have corporate backing Why a major manufacturer decided to outsource innovative manufacturing The secret to making corporate spinouts work in Japan How to convince Japanese employees to join a spinout How to get middle-management on-board with corporate spinouts What changed in Kyoto to make it one of Japan’s best startup hubs

Links from the Founder

Everything you ever wanted to know about Mui Lab Check out the Mui Kickstarter Keep up-to-date on the Mui Blog Check them out on Facebook Follow Kaz on Twitter @mui_labo

Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs.

I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me.

If you're a fan of Disrupting Japan, you know that I have a strong dislike for attempts to make Japan sound too exotic and this goes in both directions. On one side, we have consultants who claim that Japanese business practices are so unique, arcane, and confusing that the only way westerners can possibly understand them is by paying large sums of money to consultants such as themselves.

And on the other side, of course, we have people insisting that foreigners can't really understand Japanese anime without a thorough and nuanced knowledge of Japanese language and history.

It's all utter nonsense. I mean, there are differences, of course, and those differences should be acknowledged and respected, but whether an idea is coming from Japan or America, or Germany, one true measure of the value of that idea is its universality. The most important achievements might emerge out of cultural biases or sensitivities but they address something universally true, something deeply human.

Today, we sit down with Kaz Oki of Mui Lab and we're going to talk about Mui's radical rethinking of how we should interact with computers and the different contexts for that interaction. The Mui itself is a tactile and visual user interface that literally fades into the furniture when you're not using it.

Now, this interface is clearly informed by Japanese aesthetics. In fact, some of the deeper issues Kaz and I talked about kept bubbling up in my mind in the week following the interview, and Kaz and I are going to do a follow-up later over a couple of beers in Kyoto, but there's nothing about the Mui design that looks particularly Japanese. It's tapping into a deeper and more human design sense, and that's far more interesting.

Oh, and Mui Lab also represents a very rare kind of startup, a creature far, far more rare than unicorns. Mui Lab is an innovative and successful Japanese corporate spin-out. We talk about how Kaz made that work, his valiant battles against multiple layers of middle management, and how he managed to recruit top startup talent into that company, but you know, Kaz tells that story much better than I can, so let's get right to the interview.

[pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] Interview Tim: So, I'm sitting here with Kaz Oki, the co-founder of Mui Lab, so thanks for sitting down with us.

Kaz: Yeah, thank you for having us.

Tim: It's great to finally have you on the show. So, Mui is a woodgrained control panel for the home but yeah, I think you can probably describe it better than I can.

Kaz: Yeah, Mui is originally, the concept is coming from like, Chinese philosophy. Mui Shizen is original concept, so Mui Shizen is talking about lifestyle without intention, leading naturally. So, that concept for the coming IoT world, so IoT world at the next year, 20 billion devices will be connected to each other and it's more than the people or humans, so it's like a tremendous, like the technology is coming very soon, but we don't know what's going on yet.

Tim: But you guys made really different choices than like, the rest of the world and I love people who are making different choices, so everything else is focusing on additional interfaces, additional functionality, additional features, but you guys really went the opposite way -- you tried to scale things back.

Kaz: Yeah, we make the technology like a zen garden, so zen garden is like, expression of the world but the element is only stone, sound and like, plants.

Tim: Yeah, and very much focused on touch.

Kaz: Right, right, right, yeah.

Tim: Whereas one of the things I felt was interesting with both Amazon Alexa and Google Home are really focusing on voice commands, but you guys very intentionally stayed away from voice, so what was your thinking in that decision?

Kaz: So, there's a couple of reasons. One is synergy. We are a spin-out from a company called Nissha. Nissha is the largest touch panel company, and we also focused on visual aesthetics and the touch panel combination, so from that point of view, we focus on touch panel --

Tim: On the touch?

Kaz: Display system, and at that point of view, we focus on what’s the essential value for the people or human, and then these just two measures of value from like, a user's perspective, so that's visual and tactile feeling.

Tim: Right.

Kaz: So, that really matched to our technology.

Tim: And I noticed, you've gotten -- I mean, this aesthetic, this design sense has gotten you a lot of attention and award overseas as well. You won like, the most innovative at CES this year and a Best of Kickstarter award. Do you think it's just because what you're doing is so different from everyone else or do you think there's like, something fundamental that we just want to interact with something simple?

Kaz: I think we probably visualized the hidden problem, which we describe as like the relationship between technology and the people. In other words, user experience. Sometimes, we get smart speaker or smartphone coming up but it's always a technology-centered design, but our approach is human-centered technology design.

Tim: Yeah, and I guess you're right. So much of design now is driven by the technology in that we have touch-sensitive displays, what can we do with this? We have smart speakers, what can we do with this? And as a result, it's just, it's a lot of innovation, it's a lot of creativity, but it's people just adding more and more and more, and more.

Kaz: Right, right, it's like, more features.

Tim: And you guys are actually trying to take things away.

Kaz: Trying to remove from in front of us, but backend technology is actually the same. We use cloud or like the latest computing, but to deliver that technology to touch-based or certain like, a human relationship, we changed that delivery system.

Tim: Okay, so tell me about your customers. Who's the target audience for Mui, is it homeowners or gadget geeks, or interior designers?

Kaz: So, actually, we started targeting interior designers or architects, so that's our original concept, and in extension to that, we made a Kickstarter for the smart home or those like, those early adopter users, but in the meantime, we've been piling up our technology platform. It's a very niche platform, but we have patent and we have like, UX system, we have like a cloud structure, so we make that a very small platform, and now licensing to other companies.

Tim: But most of the current interest, is it coming from Japan or from the international market?

Kaz: International market, yeah.

Tim: Why do you suppose that is? Because this has such a strong Japanese design sense to it.

Kaz: I think that wood material, it's like common sense for everybody, so from that, like a traditional or authentic behavior point of view, sometimes, people love our technology.

Tim: Well, I think so. I mean, wood, we humans have been working with wood for the last 15,000 years. It's pretty fundamental, but do you think it's just the foreign companies have been more willing to try new things than the Japanese companies?

Kaz: I think Japanese are most of the time, we follow the concept from overseas, especially like, technology, but those leading countries like the US, it's technology-driven but also, there is a certain amount of people focusing on the issue of technology.

Tim: Yeah. So many Japanese startup founders have told me that they first got interest overseas and when the Japanese companies saw the overseas interest, then they became interested.

Kaz: Yeah, it's exactly that!

Tim: The same thing happened?

Kaz: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim: That's got to be a little frustrating though.

Kaz: Right, right, right, yeah, Japan is not a trendsetter, yeah. It's actually more like a follower.

Tim: At least, the large companies. I think there's a lot of really amazing things going on in startups and tiny companies.

Actually,