DAB design horror

On a wander around town yesterday, and the usually visitations to a series of purveyors of consumer electronics, a started to take an interest in the range of DAB digital radios which are currently available on the high street.

Am I the only person of the opinion that the design of the DAB units are universally awful!

What is it about wood paneling, bulbous 1950's retro styling or 60s modernistic design that offer themselves as the winning look for manufactures. As for leather binding ........

I mean, some of these units are truly hideous.

Just exactly which type of household are these things supposed to fit in?

I can only come to the conclusion that there is either:
a) A desire to make the technology less daunting for users by making them look old fashioned
b) An attempt to make the devices 'date' even more rapidly in an attempt to stimulate further sales.

A report last month suggested the digital radio sales were set to boom - really, looking like this?

Now I'm pretty much a function over form type, and I'm interested in getting a DAB clock radio (I have digital radio via free view elsewhere in the house), but I just can't bring myself to invest in one of these monstrosities.

I mean, just look at these!

So, a look online reveals a greater range of products and some more palatable designs, but the high street stores seem to have gone exclusively for the naff!

Kitsch is kitsch. Ironic design is delusional!!!

Comments

Winter Wonderland

The first snow of the season fell here yesterday afternoon. So, I know I'm a 'grown up', but I can't help but get excited by such things. My Dad always said that people loose the wonder and excitement of snow fall once they have to start commuting to work. I'm lucky, if I look at the window and the roads are impassable, I don't have to bother heading off to the office. Thanks to the technology of my trade home working is habitual anyway. Is technology responsible for allowing me to keep a sense of wonder, and enjoy the vagaries of mother nature for what she is, rather than seeing her meteorological mood swings only in terms the effect of my daily grind. Maybe, or maybe I'm just an entry level weather geek! Whatever, come lunchtime I'm off to take Monty the dog out to play in the snow!

Digital Will

A conversation with a bunch of colleagues yesterday got me to thinking. We were in our usual free form Socratic Dialogue mode and were discussing the drive to digitisation of personal media and what concept, if any, the general public had of the longevity or persistence of their data. With the human weakness in our inability to empathise with our future selves and the short term focus that a fast moving society engenders, have we really thought things through sufficiently. When I upload my photos to Flickr , I’m just assuming they are going to be there forever or more accurately I don’t perceive of any time at which they won’t be there. If I think about it a little longer I suppose I assume that the Flickr system will ensure a roll with the times and that my pictures will be retrievable and trans-codable into whatever system makes sense as the years go by. The Urban myth would have us believe that the data which ran the ‘69 Moon landing is no longer readable and we’ve forgotten the for...

The Art of the state

A few weeks back I was working with the dev team at WGC on some interface design for our product prototype. We came across a point at which we have to give the user the ability to indicate their desire to save a current state. As we discussed the various ways in which we could visually indicate a 'save' action button, I realized that as a whole the industry has settled on the image of a 'floppy disc' such as this: Now in this day and age the floppy disk is an anachronism - have any of the myspace generation even ever seen one? It is certainly a few years since the average family PC came with a floppy drive as standard equipment and an online life requires little in the way of tangible media. - and yet the iconography persists. The more I thought about this however, the more I came to think that if we needed to provide a user action which is exemplified by an outmoded concept, then maybe we should rethink our interface and indeed application architecture at a deeper lev...

Techiedog-blog

Search This Blog