There was a recent TED lecture I watched where Don Norman described his ideas on Design. Some products are designed for utility, others for aesthetic appeal. Be it something you want to show off or something that brings a smile on your face, the design to appeal to ones emotion is kind of an important component of design as an art form.

Sometimes, designers may get so caught up with the idea of aesthetic design that they may overlook utility. Apple as a company is extremely well respected for their industrial design and striking the amazing balance between emotive design and an utilitarian product. And once in a while some products come along that is designed so well that people will ignore the lack of features and be willing to pay more money too, Think of the iPod.

A couple of days back, apple released a cool new iPod. The new iPod shuffle.

Notice that Apple is breaking its very successful click wheel / circular button layout with this iPod. You might also notice that there are no buttons on the surface, except for the tiny notch that is visible on top (You might want to visit apple to check out how it works).

Breaking a well established user interface is a great gamble to take. I am supposing that the design engineers, once they convinced the marketing and managing bosses, had a field day designing the product.

When I saw this shuffle, the first thing is stuck me was this:

Am I the only one to see the resemblance? Even the dimensions of the product match up approximately. The dimensions of the monolith is supposed to be 1:4:9 (squares of 1,2,3) and I see that the iPod shuffle (ignoring the clip) is about 5mm X 18mm X 45mm (almost a 1:4:9). I surely don’t see this as a coincidence, but a deliberate design choice. I can imagine the marketing insisting the need for a clip and the designers having a fight over removing it and finally a user group voting for having the clip, sigh.

To keep the design monolithic, apple seems to have decided to keep the surface totally blank except for the apple logo (pity about that too), but they put it on the clip

Not reading too deep on the corporate message that apple is passing, but I think it is not very subtle and we can expect brave new directions / products from them:

It is really cool to see a company not sitting on their successful products and designs (when was the last time creative changed its software interface) and bravely walk into unknown territory. Apple has the financial might to not worry about the failure of the shuffle but I don’t think that’s what drives them to innovate. If you look at the history of the company under Jobs (sometimes others too), they were highly innovative and not worried much about the implications to the company. As consumers, we benefit from their successes and failures and should be thankful that someone is looking out to push the boundaries of design innovation.