Beats M Phone

Category_ Consumer Electronics
Date_ 10.2019
Location_ Pasadena, California
ArtCenter College of Design
“Beats M Phone” aims to provide a unique way of interaction for both musicians and music enthusiasts as a portable remixer & mobile phone.

You can play around with your music by interacting with the back panel.

Student project/not affiliated with Beats by Dre.









01/Intro
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.




02/Concepts
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.



For music related electronic devices, the feel of interaction must be one the most important attributes to consider about. So I did some sketches to explore the interaction and pick the coolest direction to work with (and of course it would be feasible). 

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.).




The integrated AI would learn the unique finger gestures (your “music fingerprint“) by users and generate a set of possible intuitive way for you to interact with.
03/Visualization
After locking down the design, I built the 3D model in Solidworks and rendered it in KeyShot.











P.S.After designing this mobile phone for 3 years, I still think this is a solid design and a cool mobile phone.

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.


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