Week 3 - Playing around with shapes and colors

Once I had decided that I was focusing on headphones, I began to think about colour and more about shapes. At this point I wasn’t sure about what my final outcome would be but I knew I wanted to create a product that in some sort of way played music. Currently people listen to music through headphones or portable speakers. Apple recently released their bluetooth headphones however its nothing too exciting, just the apple ear piece without the wire. I wanted to discover an alternative of listening to music that would also look stylish at the same time.

I looked at the basic shapes that regular headphones are which are circular and then this led me to the design of boomboxes which were used in the 1970's to play music. The way boomboxes work are that sound is delivered through an amplifier and two or more integrated loudspeakers. A boombox is a device typically capable of receiving radio stations and playing recorded music. Although the initial use was for playing music, boomboxes soon became a fashionable item, the boombox became a part of their outfit and users would decorate their boomboxes to express themselves.

The design of the boombox has inspired current designers such as Axel Pfaender who brought together the classic boombox style with today’s audio technology who created a DIY boombox kit that connects to your phone and plays music. I was rather intrigued by the design of this and felt inspired and I expressed this by playing around with random shapes and colours. I then started to think about how I could create a product that takes on a different form from the usual circular form of headphones.