Sony Park Mini, an experimental pop-up space of around 30 m² for the New Ginza Sony Park scheduled to be completed in 2024, opened Park Lab as a series program.

Sony’s engineers and creators are constantly seeking ways that technology and creativity can contribute to create experiences that move people’s hearts. Park Lab is a program intended to offer a peek into the future discovered within everyday life by Sony. It is an experimental space designed to encourage people to see things in daily life from slightly different perspectives.

Park Lab EXPT. 06 will be held from Friday, March 17 to Sunday, March 26 on the theme "What stories do circulating materials weave?" It is a program designed to introduce Sony’s "Original Blended Material," an environmentally conscious paper material.

Sony developed "Original Blended Material" as part of its activities to reduce environmental impact. This paper material is made from bamboo, sugarcane fibers, and post-consumer recycled paper. It can be optimized and molded for various applications by adjusting the composition of raw materials to obtain different colors and levels of hardness. As such, "Original Blended Material" is used as readily recyclable packaging in some products. However, the original aim of its development was to communicate the story behind its provenance—where it came from, what it used to be, and how it was made into its present form. By making this whole process visible, we hoped to encourage customers to become more aware of the environment and engage more actively in recycling. The designers involved in the development traveled around the world to see first-hand the environment where the plants grow and carefully select the raw materials. The raw materials are also sourced close to Sony’s manufacturing sites to minimize environmental impact from transport. Most importantly, the action of the customer who receives this completes the environmental cycle.

At Sony Park Mini, we used this "Original Blended Material" to create a mobile art installation that expresses the "story of circulation related by materials." This is an experiment to explore how knowing the provenance of a material changes people’s awareness of the environment, and whether it offers any positive insight.