Designing the in-between.

間（ま）を、デザインする。

Milieu Creative is a design collective between San Francisco and Tokyo. For twenty-five years we’ve worked at the seams of hardware, interface and brand — on a Marantz amplifier’s front panel, a TDK industrial dashboard, Audi’s first EV launch at a historic Tokyo venue. The work travels well across the Pacific because we do.

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Marantz Model 10 — EISA 2025 · iF Design Denon — #1 home theatre, Japan (BCN) TDK SensEI — CES Innovation Award Twenty-five years — SF ↔ Tokyo
Field notes

Between hardware and interface, between a Marantz lab and a Tokyo loading dock.

Our weeks shuttle between a Marantz prototyping bench in Kanagawa, a studio off Market Street in San Francisco, and the floor of a TDK plant partner outside Nagoya. The thinking that holds across those three rooms is a short list: that a volume knob at 2 a.m. deserves the same care as a launch keynote, that the first dashboard a plant operator loads should earn trust in a glance, that a Japanese test-drive guest and a Californian engineer are asking the same question through different manners. The work below is twenty-five years of carrying that answer across.

Selected work

Work we’ve been part of.

A quarter-century’s worth of amplifiers, industrial dashboards, EV launches, DJ interfaces and conference stages. The selection below is a slice; the fuller portfolio runs deeper. If you’d like case studies closer to your category — health, hospitality, industrial AI, luxury retail — ask and we’ll send more.

TDK SensEI dashboard — industrial asset monitoring at a glance
TDK SensEI·CES Innovation Award

Three companies, one intelligent interface.

Platform live · dashboard in production across three TDK business units
Edge AI · Industrial IoT→
Rakuten Fit
Rakuten Fit

A fitness app with a stake in your health.

Health-rewards app, shipped inside the Rakuten points ecosystem
Mobile · Fintech→
AI design-to-code workflow — Antigravity IDE
AI Workflow

Design-to-code, with no handoff in between.

2026 · An AI-native design-engineering workflow, in production
AI-native · Design engineering→
Marantz interface design prototype — porthole audio UI language
Denon · Marantz

A seventy-year-old porthole, now a display.

EISA 2025 · iF Design · Denon soundbars #1 in Japan (BCN)
Interface · Audio→
Traktor Pro 4 with Beatport Streaming — Native Instruments + Beatport integration
Beatport · Native Instruments

Where the DJ booth meets the music catalogue.

Shipped inside Traktor Pro 4 · Beatport Streaming on the deck
Music tech→
TechCrunch Disrupt visual ID — San Francisco as a data landscape
TechCrunch Disrupt·Visual ID

A conference finds its visual voice.

Full visual identity for the Disrupt stage, San Francisco edition
Brand · Live event→
Audi Q4 e-tron Japan launch — experience journey map
Ogilvy · Audi Q4 e-tron·Japan launch

A four-chapter immersive launch for Audi's first EV in Japan.

Enterprise event + original creative · 16 touchpoints with Ogilvy · Shiba Oh Shiro
Experiential · Agency→
Fabrion — AI agent platform for industrial manufacturing
Fabrion·AI Agent Platform

Teaching machines to earn human trust.

AI-agent platform, shipped on the industrial MES floor
AI agents · Industrial MES→
Alongside
Apple Google Linux Microsoft Qt Denon Marantz Dolby DTS Yamaha Audi Ogilvy Quark Adobe Slalom NHK TechCrunch Native Instruments Beatport Pioneer DJ Fabrion Rakuten Pega TDK SpaceX
The studio

How we work, and with whom.

Milieu is small by design. We take on three or four engagements at a time so the senior people doing the sketching are the same people on the client call. Three shapes of engagement, in English or Japanese, often braided together inside one piece of work:

01

Product design, end to end

From the first sketch to the shipped interface. Research, interaction and design engineering as one arc, for teams building hardware, software or the surface between them.

  • Research & design strategy
  • Interaction & interface
  • Prototyping & design engineering
  • Experimental & AI-native UX
02

Market entry, US ↔ Japan

Positioning, partners and distribution for US companies entering Japan and Japanese companies entering the US. On-the-ground relationships, not slide decks; the kind of introductions that come with a shared dinner.

  • Positioning & narrative
  • Partner & distribution introductions
  • Localisation strategy, not translation
  • Launch & go-to-market
03

A design partner, in residence

Embedded direction when you’re between hires — a senior partner holding the quality bar on product and brand while you grow the team around it.

  • Design direction
  • Hiring & team shape
  • Critique & review cycle
  • Advisor & board seat
About

Shipping in two languages, from the layer between product, media and market.

プロダクト・メディア・市場の「間」で、二つの言語で出荷する。

Milieu comes from two old French words — mi ("middle" or "media") and lieu ("a place") — and names the physical and social environment in which new products and services emerge. Japanese tradition captures the same idea in a single word: MA (間), the designed space between things.

In an increasingly cross-platform digital society, the configuration of human, technology and media is the most important foundation we can build on. Milieu Creative works at that layer — from the ecosystem analysis to product UX and of a shipped product to consulting on business direction and the social environment it enters.

Founder Keisuke Shingu has worked in product and interface design for twenty-five years, mostly in the United States, and in recent years supporting Japanese companies as they expand globally. The practice extends through a network of partners — Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, India, Vietnam, Berlin, London — who help fact-check the ideas as they take shape.

milieuという言葉は、「中間やメディア」を意味するmiと、「場所や環境」を意味するlieuという、二つの古いフランス語に由来します。新しい製品やサービスが生まれ、発展する際の物理的・社会的環境を形づくる仕事を、日本の伝統的な概念で表現すれば「間（ま）のデザイン」となります。

ますます複雑化し、プラットフォームの横断化が求められるデジタル社会における製品やサービスの創出において、プロダクト・メディア・市場という環境の設定は、最も重要なビジネス基盤です。milieu Creativeは、UI/UXの実装から事業戦略のコンサルティングまで、新しい社会環境に適合する多様なビジネスを一気通貫で支援します。

ファウンダーの新宮圭輔は、米国を中心にUI/UXイノベーターとして20年以上のキャリアを持ち、近年は世界を視野に入れた日本企業の支援に注力しています。東京・ニューヨーク・ロサンゼルス・サンフランシスコ・ポートランド・シアトル・インド・ベトナム・ベルリン・ロンドンのスタッフとパートナーが、持続可能なビジネスアイデアをファクトチェックします。

貴社のシーズを、世界のニーズに。

A collective of industry experts with a global network — adding experience design to the way companies think about brand, product and e-commerce.

新宮　圭輔 — Milieu Creative　代表
東京とサンフランシスコを拠点に、業界エキスパートからなるコレクティブで、ブランド・プロダクト・ECに体験設計を重ねます。

01

Product, media and market as one piece

The three set each other up. We design the environment a product lands into — the room, the moment, the sentence a buyer reads first — not the artefact alone on a plinth.

02

Translate markets, not just copy

Positioning that holds its weight on both sides of the Pacific. The partners on the ground come with it — distribution, PR, retail, legal — and they’re the ones you’ll meet, not a logo on a slide.

03

Build the thing that makes the decision real

A working prototype beats a deliverable. We ship the smallest version that answers the question, then shape it from there in rooms with the people who’ll live with it.

Start a project

Tell us about the work. We’ll come back with the first honest step.

新しいプロジェクトのご相談、お気軽にどうぞ。

Short answers are welcome. We read every brief ourselves and reply within two business days, usually sooner. If a project isn’t the right fit, we’ll say so and point you at someone we trust.

Opens your email with the brief pre-filled — you review and send.
Or write us directly
English
hello@milieu.agency
日本語
keisuke@milieu.agency
Based
San Francisco · Tokyo
Reply within
2 business days, usually sooner