Hasta La Ideas

Sure, Sony Insider’s “Interview with the Designers of…” section could be seen as a shill for their products, but I don’t mind being shilled to if a) it’s honest and b) I get to read about the product design process and hear from industrial designers who otherwise have no public voice.

In the very first paragraph of “Interview With The Designers Of The Sony W-Series Walkman,” Sony readily admits to flaws in the first generation of that product before launching into an in-depth talk with the five-person design & development team. The unique problem of how to design an essentially invisible interface (the wearable Walkman has no screen, after all) is covered in great detail, with the team eventually settling on an interface designed for automobiles. Then they get into the nitty gritty:

[Senior Designer Atsushi] Komiyama: With our user interface discussions underway, I finally got to work on industrial design. From the start, we sought a light, secure-fitting player, integrated in headphones connected by a spiral neckband. But it seemed as if something was missing, or we were taking development the wrong way. I couldn’t quell these nagging doubts. If we continued along these lines, I doubted the player would be anything more than a set of headphones, no matter how stylish it looked….

I was also concerned that it might be unclear how to wear the headphones, because of the spiral neckband. If it’s true to the Walkman tradition, anyone should intuitively know how to wear it correctly.

One day, a designer’s offhand comment led me in the right direction. Walkman players are clusters of various shapes, he said. And that’s accurate. Models to date have been simple conglomerations of flat and cylindrical parts. This observation inspired the flat surface you see when the left and right earpieces are magnetically linked.

When stored, the Walkman W maintains this classic, composite appearance. When worn, the two earpieces are split apart. This action of separating them has the strange effect of revealing to new users how to wear the player. And when the earpieces are joined, a magnetic sensor automatically pauses or stops playback. It makes sense, this chain of events from separating the earpieces to listen, wearing them, and joining them again when you’re finished. It’s not just a matter of styling; we orchestrated the way you use the device itself, the series of events from beginning to end.

The entire interview’s pretty interesting. Check it out here.

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