Interview with Yujin Morisawa, Kunihito Sawai and Taku Sugawara

The Rolly Sound Entertainment Player by Sony is extraordinary – in every respect. The jury of this year’s “red dot award: product design” was so impressed, that they awarded “Rolly” a “red dot: best of the best”. “Rolly” has been created by combining various expertises of many Sony designers. The leaders from each field are: Yujin Morisawa, who has been working for Sony since 2002, Kunihito Sawai, who has been with Sony since 1991 and was responsible for the concept and the prototype design, and Taku Sugawara, who has been with Sony CreativeWorks since 2007 and was in charge of the design of the Motion Editor PC application and LED design of the main unit.

“Rolly” is an extraordinary audio product, in every respect. What was your inspiration behind it?
Kunihito Sawai: About three years ago, the engineers involved in the “AIBO” development paid me a visit and put an unusual egg-shaped object on my desk. As I reached to pick it up, it suddenly started playing music and doing an amusing little dance. This pleasant surprise was my first encounter with an early “Rolly” prototype. Just one look and I was hooked. At the same time, I couldn’t visualise a starting point for designing such a product. The more I examined and learned about it, the more I realised this little “egg” was inherently and strangely captivating. But how to capture this quality and enhance it through design? The key to its fate was concept design. We started by taking a closer look at the Rolly prototype and carefully sorting out the inherent qualities that made it so intriguing.

What design measures have you used to integrate the advanced technology into the device in such a way that the user is not at all aware of it?
Taku Sugawara: First, we sorted out the information we were dealing with. We filtered out ideas, with “movement” as our guiding concept, until ultimately, we succeeded in making Rolly itself become a switch for various functions. The volume can be controlled by twisting Rolly. To play the next track, slide Rolly forward. For shuffle mode, pick it up and shake it. I think controlling playback by moving Rolly this way matches the key concept of motion well. I think what sets the design concept apart is how we have eliminated concrete elements (such as a display for track titles or album covers) while providing straightforward feedback for operation, in the form of lights or tones. We’ve taken steps to ensure users know the playback mode intuitively by these lights and tones. Light blue illumination on the sides means normal mode, and purple means shuffle mode. That’s all new users need to remember.

What kind of design would you love to work on in future?
Yujin Morisawa, Kunihito Sawai, Taku Sugawara: We want to design products for the sake of ease of use, which is an approach different from existing products. For example, you use your TV to watch TV shows, but if you were to use it for something else it wouldn’t act like a TV and you wouldn’t call it a TV either. The Rolly is an example of a product designed using this approach. We’d really like to come up with some entirely new design concepts and design more of this “family” of products.