Date_ 10.2019
Location_ Pasadena, California
ArtCenter College of Design
You can play around with your music by interacting with the back panel.
Student project/not affiliated with Beats by Dre.
The image below shows some mobile phones from around 2000s. Back then, there were music cell phones, business cell phones, photography cell phones, and cell phones that had those weird but funky features.
But now, people actually don’t have many choices on the mobile phone market. Companies start their arms race. Most cell phones look the same and act the same.
Althought it’s game of supply chain & manufacturing & marketing, I still think we need to have a little bit of fun. And this is why I wanted to design a music cell phone.
But now, people actually don’t have many choices on the mobile phone market. Companies start their arms race. Most cell phones look the same and act the same.
Althought it’s game of supply chain & manufacturing & marketing, I still think we need to have a little bit of fun. And this is why I wanted to design a music cell phone.
As an industrial designer, the homogeneity of products, especially electronics, is bothering me so much…even if technology continues to advance. Music would be a pretty good category to start with.
The concept is “a jam session of mobile music".
There are nine touch points on the back side of the phone that compose a panel for users to play with music by multi-finger gestures (tap, scroll, pinch, press, swipe, etc.).
After locking down the design, I built the 3D model in Solidworks and rendered it in KeyShot.
One thing is I should have put a home button on it at least for myself. Now I’m still using iPhone SE2 which is the only iPhone in the Apple Store that still has a home button. I just cannot use full-screen or all-screen cell phones. I feel helpless when I use them...I had one but returned it eventually.
Recently Kanye West dropped this music devcie called STEM PLAYER that allows you Customise any song and splits any song into stems, which shows that this kind of dots interaction on music devices totally has feasibility on the market.