Sony designers, with Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, are presenting a selection of archetypes and prototypes which show how technology could be incorporated into the home in the future.

Zona Tortona - the natural home of experimental design - hosted a thought-provoking installation from first-time exhibitors, Sony. Collaborating with London-based designers, Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, Sony’s ‘creative laboratory’ demonstrated how sound technology could converge with furniture and lighting designs in the future.

Visitors entered an anechoic (sound-absorbing, echo-free) space in which sound waves were trapped within a forest of tiny foam cones cladding the walls, ceiling and floor. Within this silent space were five areas where sound experiments took physical shape.

These included art-like objects - a wooden dome, clear Perspex cone and a Corian ring - each containing a solenoid (a wire coil in which a magnetic field is established by passing an electrical current through it) that set up a vibration and made the objects behave as loudspeakers, transmitting sounds fed to them from an MP3 player. A pendant light, whose shade doubled as a loudspeaker, performed similarly.

As new archetypes, these “sound objects” were purely conceptual. Yet their potential for our domestic landscapes was evident. And if Sony’s goal is to re-position the brand’s design technology as an object’s “soul” – rather than its exterior hardware – then this was a brave start.