Mui Lab, Inc.
About
mui Lab, Inc. is a calm technology company based in Kyoto, Japan, founded in October 2017. It began as a corporate venture initiative within Nissha Co., Ltd. and became independent through a management buyout in April 2019, with Nissha remaining a major shareholder. Its chief executive is Kazunori Oki, and it maintains offices in Tokyo, Nagano and Frankfurt alongside the Kyoto headquarters.[1]
The company states its mission as "creating a mindful life and society where people, nature, and technology are in peaceful harmony."
The mui Board
The company's flagship product is the mui Board: a panel of solid wood that functions as a smart home interface. At rest it is a plank — no screen, no glow, no indicator lights, indistinguishable from a piece of trim on a wall. Touch it and text and controls appear through the surface of the wood; take the hand away and after a moment it returns to being a plank.[2]
The design does one thing that almost no consumer device does: its default state is off, and off means genuinely absent rather than dimmed. The associated mui Platform combines the wood display technology with the company's IoT cloud system, and later products include the muihaus smart home offering.
Why the Wood Matters
The material choice is the argument, not a styling decision.
A screen is a permanent claim on attention even when idle, because its presence in a room says that something might appear on it. A wooden surface makes no such claim. It also does the other things natural materials do — it is warm to the touch, it ages, it takes marks, and it reads as furniture rather than as equipment. See natural material and materials.
The company connects this explicitly to Japanese aesthetic traditions, and the connection is more than marketing: the preference for restraint, for materials that show their grain and their age, and for objects that recede rather than announce, is a long-standing design position that happens to align closely with what calm technology arrived at from human-computer interaction. mui Lab is one of the few companies working at that intersection deliberately.
Position in the Field
mui Lab is a rare case of calm technology principles surviving contact with a product that has to be manufactured, priced and sold. Most calm technology exists as research prototypes, gallery installations or written principles; the constraints that kill it commercially are cost, the difficulty of explaining a device that does nothing visible, and a retail environment that rewards products which demonstrate themselves on a shelf.
The company's products are Calm Tech Certified — see Calm Tech Institute — and it has been a consistent presence at CES and in design press coverage, which is itself notable: a company whose entire proposition is that its product should not be noticed has to be unusually good at getting it noticed.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
mui Lab is the most useful current example of what the arguments on this site look like when built. It demonstrates that the attention critique has a physical form, that material choice is an attention decision, and that a device can be designed to be present without being demanding.
Related Reading
- Calm Technology
- Calm Tech Institute
- Natural Material
- Materials
- Tangible Media
- Matt Gorbet
- Japanese Concepts
