Category: Product Design

Jaren Goh and Isamu Sanada‘s unsolicited conceptual industrial designs indicate a shift in the relationship between consumers and hardware manufacturers. Their respective, speculative remixes of Sony Ericsson and Apple products are often better than the real thing…

In computing and media, trends in open-source, RSS, P2P and Web 2.0 are redefining those industries with the user’s needs and desires at the centre. User’s needs are met by an infinitely extensible and coupleable palette of components.

Jaren Goh’s Black Diamond concept phone is the perfect example – I want this product, as I’m sure many others do, why can’t Sony build it for me? Consumer electronics is still thinking in terms of hits whereas software is beginning to understand the potential of a long tail of niches.

With the emergence of open source hardware, blogjects, spimes and desktop fabbing, I hope we’ll soon see the notion of Situational Hardware emerge to accompany, what Shirky termed, Situational Software.

This month’s Wired profiles Schimmel’s Pegasus Grand and Pegasus Upright – bold and astonishing remixes of time-honoured piano form factors. Where the Grand dreamily levitates several feet above the ground, the Upright is reminiscent of late 90’s era Apple…the iTinkle?

Schimmel is a very traditional instrument maker, so it is gratifying to see such a company extending their heritage into the future with daring industrial design.

If your PCs, Liveboxes and signature phones can’t be similarly evocative and delightful…then why should anyone buy them 😉

Some interesting thoughts on product design and the visual launguage of digital products from Lenovo‘s design director, David Hill…

Technologies have shrunk to the point where designers can make PCs look like whatever they want–toasters, cigar boxes or elephant feet. But should they? When you can make a computer look like whatever you want, your choices should have integrity. They should be respectful of how people use the device. Form doesn’t precede function, or vice versa. They are simultaneous choices.

Read more at The zen of technology design…