Skip to main content

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

Popular posts from this blog

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...

Silicon Valley and Everywhere else

It has been an interesting month with a lot of exciting work with a lot of smart people taking up my time. I've had my head down and been doing some serious graft and hadn't really noticed the minor details like the fact that I'd bounced between three continents , changed my time zone 8 times and taken eating out with all meals accompanied by technical debate and napkin sketching to be the normal way to consume sustenance. Then last week I had a reality check when I suddenly realized I was in fact doing for a living something I dreamed of as a kid. So, what prompted this moment of clarity? Well, I looked up and found myself hurtling down the 101 between Burlingame and Palo Alto in Silicon Valley in the back of a rented mini-van, MacBook balanced on my knee , hacking some last bits of code together for a product demo I was about to deliver at Stanford University ! Now I may have been doing the relatively easy job from the technical point of view of getting the Rails co...

bmedia Presentation materials and links

Thanks to everyone for being such an engaging audience last night - it was a pleasure to talk to you all. If any one has any questions or wants to argue against anything I said feel free to email me or post a comment here. You won't offend me by disagreeing with anything I said, I welcome debate and am not too proud to surrender to a well reasoned argument - debate helps us all understand better. As always with these things there are points I realize I should have made and other things I realize I should have expanded upon but time is always such a limited commodity. If any one can make it to the next Leeds open coffee we can talk further. Thanks for some really interesting questions and conversations after the presentation. As promised, the presentation (as a PDF) can be download from here : Also, below is the reading list I recommend and also the list of Web 2.0 apps that are worth taking a look at to see if they can help you in your business. If you find any others you like, pl...