Project about the identity of digital audio players, under the guidance of Prof. Sabine Wald. Unlike its predecessors, digital audio players don’t have dedicated, standardized, voluminous storage media like CDs or tapes and the peripheral mechanics. They can take almost any physical form; they (yet) have no archetype, no clear identity. It’s sometimes not easy to tell them apart from other digital devices, like mobile phones and GPS handhelds. The pictures above show some of my first thoughts about this issue. I made a shape that resembles music rhythms. A wrapping display forms the media layer, which is manipulated through control elements “from inside”. The buttons are significant and show in their traditional form: volume control turns up and down, play/pause button pushes down, keeps half-way in and pushes up; there’s also a separate switch for selecting play modes. (Jan 2005)