Hasta La Ideas

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pemThe Revo Heritage in its natural setting./em/p

pAs an interaction designer, I steel myself for disappointment in almost every consumer electronics product that I buy, apart from those by emthat/em company in Cupertino. Practically every device I own falls into one of two categories. Some have decent product design chops, but the interaction design feels like it was created by another department who never even bothered to chat with the design team around the water cooler. The others have interfaces that work well enough, but the device itself looks like the worst excesses of a teenage boy’s doodles on the back of his schoolbook./p

div class=”article_quote”I’m waxing lyrical about the Revo Heritage because it was evident from the outset that an awful lot of attention to detail had gone into designing not only the device but the interface../div

pFor a long time, I have wanted the device that does it allmdash;docks my iPod, receives Digital Audio Broadcasts (DAB) and FM radio in addition to being Wi-Fi capable, but resisted the urge to buy yet another consumer electronics product that I was just going to end up hating. However, just before Christmas I treated myself to an early presentmdash;the a href=”http://www.revo.co.uk/digital-radio/revo-heritage.php”Revo Heritage Radio/a. Quite apart from satisfying all my music needs in the kitchen (it also hooks into a href=http://www.last.fmLast.fm/a), it’s a beautiful piece of product design./p

pI’m waxing lyrical about the Revo Heritage because it was evident from the outset that an awful lot of attention to detail had gone into designing not only the device but the interface. I felt praise was due and pinged an e-mail to Heritage Managing Director, David Baxter, who mailed me back straight away saying, “Thanks for taking the time to write, it really made my day.” I wanted to know more about this small company based in Scotland turning out such great productsmdash;the Heritage just won a 2010 Red Dot Product Design Award./p

pRevo’s other products have a more obviously technological look to them, but the Heritage makes a deliberate break from this, so I was intrigued by the influences./p

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pemIn a reversal of process, these early sketches were actually done after the initial computer renders in order to quickly think through variations./em/p

p”As a brand, Revo was a relatively late entrant to the DAB digital radio market, with our first product (a href=”http://www.revo.co.uk/digital-radio/revo-pico-radiostation.php”Pico/a) going on sale in December 2006,” says Baxter. “At that time, the market was dominated by a collection of retro-influenced radios housed in wooden cabinets. There was very little visual differentiation between brands, and in my opinion a general lack of imagination. My view was that Revo should go the other way, by producing radios with a very contemporary look and feelmdash;anti-retro to a certain extent. Why would a retailer want to stock yet another me-too, wooden boxed retro-radio brand? We decided that design and modernity would be our point of difference. We boldly said that we’d never produce a wooden radio, and joked that we wanted to be ‘more Bamp;O than Bamp;Q.’/pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/interaction_product_design_a_peek_inside_the_revo_heritage_radio__16303.asp”(more…)/a
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