Material Thoughts - Design for Manufacture or the Customer?

You don’t have to be a designer to appreciate great design.

Does it get any better than the Apple iPod?

In terms of function, all it does is play music from a small computer hard drive. This may not seem all that impressive given that transistor radios were unleashed upon us in 1954 and other portable music players like the Sony Walkman have been available since 1979. Yet with sales figures exceeding 2 million IPod’s in the last financial quarter compared with 860,000 in the previous quarter you can’t argue with the numbers.

It’s a great success, which is now evolving into a photo and music album in the form of the recently released iPod Photo.

So why is the iPod so successful?

Simple really, really simple design.

It does what it’s supposed to do, it’s easy to use, it works with the other machines it needs to work with, its fun to use and, as an object, its very desirable.

Now, I’ve never used an Apple Mac, but I often sit behind my ubiquitous beige PC box, desperate to find a reason why I need an Apple G5 and one of those big floaty screens.

On top of the design chic there’s the warm fuzzy feeling of buying an Apple product.

Currently, everything about the look and feel of the company and products feels right and they also do their bit for the planet by using materials in an environmentally sound man

more: azom.com/news.asp?newsID=2210 (111)

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