Posts Tagged ‘Product Design’

Steve Jobs recently unveiled Apple’s new iPod Nano. The forth generation Nano is supposed to be the thinnest yet, with clever new functions such as ’shake to shuffle’ which basically shuffles your songs at the flick of a wrist. It also boasts a ‘genius’ feature which claims to be able to find similar songs in your music library that sound great together. Perhaps these machines really are becoming self aware, although I’m guessing that if you think Cliff and The Ting Tings sit well together your going to be disappointed!

These modifications and tweaks are a world away from the original idea behind a portable digital audio player. Who would have thought that the vision of a 23 year old Kane Kramer would go on to sell over 160 million units for Apple alone. The British inventors’ designs back in 1979 set out to revolutionise the music industry and went on to become the blue print for what we now know as the MP3 player.

The original idea involved using telephone lines to distribute the music, naturally this would have resulted in an analog sound as this was many years before the internet was available. The device stored just 3.5 minutes of music onto a chip. However, in 1988 with the patents not being renewed the technology became public property and the rest, as they say, is history.

Apple recently recognised Kane Kramer for his inventorship and now he now acts as an expert consultant. Small change considering Apple have made billions of dollars from iPod sales.

The sketch for Kramer’s music player bares a striking resemblance to the original iPod. Next week drawings of flying cars!

The notion of digital onscreen graphics (web) replacing printed media is not a new one. However, the idea of books making way for digital readers sends a shiver down your spine. Although there are other models on the market, the Sony Reader seems to have drawn a considerable amount of media attention of late.

There are obvious benefits to owning a digital ‘reader’ not least the fact that they can hold up to 160 eBooks. Imagine all of those empty bookshelves up and down the country. Although we can’t see this happening over night, especially as the Sony Reader is priced at a not very inviting £199.00.

The main drawback to these ‘readers’ is the lack of presence. A book remains a physical object, tangible and personal to it’s owner. A great cover design can draw our attention and add character to a book. We can become immersed in a book, picking it up everyday, creasing the cover and folding the corners when we can’t find a bookmark, oh and the battery never runs out on a book! The battery on the Sony Reader is rumored to last up to 7,000 page turns, although this appears to be a considerable amount you can guarantee that it will run out just when you don’t want it to.

Each eBook purchased is rights managed, in a similar way to tracks downloaded from the iTunes Store. The software is Windows based and not geared towards Mac OS (getting a thumbs down from us), but apparently with a bit of  jiggery pokery it can be hooked up to a Mac. You can also view PDF’s… in monotone (oh the joy, whoop whoop), but we all have iPods for that, don’t we?

It appears that Waterstones are the official re-seller of the Sony Reader. For more info, check out this link. www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/navigate.do?pPageID=1576

For those of you that share our love of all things Mac. You may find this post quite enlightening, we did!

The year 2008 marks the 10th Anniversary of the iMac, the computer that changed everything at Apple, hailing a new design era spearheaded by design genius Jonathan Ive. What most people don’t know is that there’s another man whose products are at the heart of Ive’s design philosophy, an influence that permeates every single product at Apple, from hardware to user-interface design. That man is Dieter Rams, and his old designs for Braun during the ’50s and ’60s hold all the clues not only for past and present Apple products, but their future as well:

When you look at the Braun products by Dieter Rams—many of them at New York’s MoMA—and compare them to Ive’s work at Apple, you can clearly see the similarities in their philosophies way beyond the sparse use of color, the selection of materials and how the products are shaped around the function with no artificial design, keeping the design “honest.”

This passion for “simplicity” and “honest design” that is always declared by Ive whenever he’s interviewed or appears in a promo video, is at the core of Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design:

• Good design is innovative.
• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design is aesthetic.
• Good design helps us to understand a product.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design is durable.
• Good design is consequent to the last detail.
• Good design is concerned with the environment.
• Good design is as little design as possible.

Ive’s inspiration on Rams’ design principles goes beyond the philosophy and gets straight into a direct homage to real products created decades ago. Amazing pieces of industrial design that still today remain fresh, true classics that have survived the test of time.

The similarities between products from Braun and Apple are sometimes uncanny, others more subtle, but there’s always a common root that provides the new Apple objects not only with a beautiful simplicity but also with a close familiarity.

For more information visit;
http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the-secrets-to-apples-future