The 83rd Installment
CMF and the Future of Product Design

by Nobuki Ebisawa,
Professor, Master Program of Innovation for Design and Engineering

Have you ever heard of CMF? It stands for Color, Material, Finish, and it's a term being used more and more in the world of product design. I often see things like "CMF Department" on the business cards of people working in design departments in the carmaker and electrical industries. These people used to simply say they were in charge of things like colors or color design, but CMF is now the mainstream term in the world of product design. Very recently, I was quite fortunate to learn about this word and the concept behind it from Mr. M.T, the person who introduced and popularized it in Japan. I decided to write this column after thinking on what he said.

Final surface finishing for products used to be limited to simple coating, plating, or "shibo" texturing (leather or other patterns applied to the surface of plastic products made by injection molding, etc.). But finishing has become much more complex: as the term CMF suggests, rather than just color as from paint, for example, surfaces undergo a combination of finishing processes that effect the materials, texture, appearance, and feel. A good example is cars, where metal surface coating is a common practice. Here, things like clear layers or layers with reflective properties are now being used in combination to achieve colors that have very complex effects which differ depending on the lighting or viewing angle. We are seeing more and more colors that one cannot give a simple name to. According to Mr. M.T, this is largely due to having entered in age when the aesthetic value provided by CMF is a major driver of consumer purchases.

Product quality has risen across the board, and customers are finding it difficult to perceive any significant differences in product functions. This had led them to focus on aesthetic value over functional value when purchasing. They say that 80% of all information transmitted to the brain is visual information, and 80% of this visual information is color information. I'd say this lines up with my memories of objects and scenes, as well: colors seem to have a bigger impact than shape. It's also consistent with my experience working in automotive design, where I found that color was a very important consideration for women when buying cars.

Materials and surface finishing give these colors further complexity while imparting a narrativity to objects and an overall sense of delight when touching them. The same colors can present themselves completely differently depending on the materials used or the complex surface finishing technique applied. Coating applied to polished metal surfaces, for example, have a completely different color feeling than when applied to porous wood. Colors can also look or feel different on three-dimensional objects that are not smooth and have some kind of pattern. CMF is the bringing of everything together by designing everything about how products interface with people as objects.

The most memorable thing Mr. M.T said was this: "Shape is rapidly becoming obsolete in modern product design." A good example of this is how cell phones evolved into smartphones as part of the march of computerization. Cellular phones of old had small hardware keypads below the screen. In addition to the 10 keys for entering telephone numbers, they had buttons with various functions. There were even devices such as blackberries, which had individual keys for each letter. But since their metamorphosis into smartphones, the surface of almost every phone consists of little more than a glass LCD screen and a home button.

I remember when a prominent industrial designer in Japan once said that product design in the future would become bipolar, with a focus on space and wearability. I thought that, in the age of IoT where all things are connected over the Internet, some kind of object would always be needed to serve as an interface. But the recent development of Amazon's Echo and other such so-called AI speakers has shown me the very real possibility of space itself eventually serving as the interface.

Personally, if we accept that mankind began as "monkeys with tools," then I believe that as long as people stay people, we will never get rid of objects. At the same time, it's a fact that the significance of objects' form and shape will fade — "shape will become obsolete" — and lose their value. But even if objects take on a bipolar existence defined by "space and wearability", it's possible that the texture of walls that make up spaces will remain. And for wearable objects, maybe an important interface will become the physical feeling of such objects against the skin, rather than their shape. And what about assistive devices, which range from tools such as hammers to simple mechanical systems such as bicycles? It's very likely that, as long as no revolution comes to the basic functional morphology of these things, tools will evolve in such a way that people will come to seek differences in how tools physically interface with people — in how enjoyable they are to use, for example. This suggests the likelihood that CMF will become more important to the act of design.

Even Company S, a leader in its day for revolutionary product design, went through a long period of having lost the appeal it once enjoyed in product design. But the company is still doing amazing things. With its OLED TVs the screens vibrate to work as speakers, and the bezels are being made as unobtrusive as possible while the stands are unable to be seen from the front, giving the sense that "the TV picture is floating in air". For all intents and purposes, these are objects for which shape has disappeared. The company has stated that it will focus on "the last inch" — on stimulating customers' five senses with its products. This phrase no doubt comes from the term "the last mile," which began in the telecommunications industry and is now often used around the world in the mobility and other industries. It originally referred to problems concerning how to connect communications networks or other such infrastructure with end users. This includes problems such as how to connect communications networks with individual customers' homes and devices, or how to travel between public transport terminals and one's home. What has made the phrase "last inch" so enduring for me is how it denotes the trajectory of modern product design. It is vitally important to consider the nature of information interfaces for things such as screen design that appeal to people's emotions, just as it is important to consider physical interfaces for the objects that will communicate that information interface. However, as in the TV example above, things may lose their form and shape as objects, with CMF remaining as the only physical interface. This seems to provide implications that CMF will replace shape and form as one aspect of product design. I find that to be a powerful notion.

Thinking about this, I somehow now understand why recent Japanese car designs have such oddly complex shapes and so many superfluous lines and planes. It could be that automotive designers are continually attempting to achieve more complex shapes in order to give proof of their identity while resisting the changing values of the times which they feel instinctively.