So, I was curious because I have this pretty cool like vintage looking popcorn maker, and I was wondering, is industrial design really dead? So I searched Amazon for "vintage mp3 player" and found this, "MECHEN M30 HiFi MP3 Player"

https://a.co/d/hJyBsyw

So, like most things, It seems like Industrial Design is alive and well, just not from the big dominant players; and isn't that what you would expect? Wouldn't you expect you'd be celebrating smaller indy shops than the big monopolies?

But, for some reason these small shops have become so anonymized that they're out of our collective consciousness, and I think there's truth to this, the problem in a sense isn't that industrial design is dead, or there are no interesting electronics, but there are in fact too many players making interesting electronics, and there's no "middle class" anymore.

TV's and smartphones are an interesting place to start though, I'd generally say that TV's and Smart Phones have improved by just being a big screen. Cars seem to me like a better example, where it feels like even companies that used to pride themselves as being different (Volkswagen) now basically all cars look the same.

Part of me agrees with the design takeaways here, and part of me admittedly prefers when my devices are as slim and unobtrusive as possible (no amount of lost desk space is worth the aesthetics of a zany computer monitor for me), but either way I'm always a little wary of these "remember the good old days of tech?" comparisons. Sometimes it feels like they're creating a false dichotomy where yesterday's devices were more pleasant to look at because they weren't tainted by corporate greed, and that today's devices are somehow uglier because all companies care about now is profit.

But these have always been mass-produced consumer devices. Even if you prefer the aesthetics of the original iMac to today's iMac, and even to the extent that corporate greed has arguably gotten worse, your relationship to Apple is the same either way--when you buy their products, you make them a lot of money.

> The peak here was arguably achieved during the 1990s and early 2000s

Interesting coincidence how the peak was achieved right when most of the audience would have been children or young adults, and therefore a time they're likely to be nostalgic for.

Talking about TVs the article goes all the way back to 2007, and not the console TVs which were actual wooden pieces of furniture with scope for artistry in the enclosure, not just "industrial design" or "Frutiger Aero" or some other buzzword.

I think the trend of removing "artistic" elements from products has been continuing for literally centuries; e.g. if you look at industrial machinery, 18th and 19th century designs are extraordinarily ornate even compared to early 20th, which are themselves far more artistic than late 20th and 21st century machines.

I'm really torn by this.

As a hardware founder, who takes great pride in our industrial design and how we've made the thinnest, and most sleek EEG ever, we wanted the device to basically disappear. Nobody wants to wear an EEG headband, it isn't what they are buying. They are buying the neurostimulation that provides better sleep.

On the other hand, our industrial engineer wanted our headband to look just like a headband. It would be completely enclosed in fabric.

I wanted it to be appealing visually, not look "weird" but also, remind the user that there was magic inside. This is one of the reasons we left a bit of the electronics poking out the back and that element has a bit of ornamentation to it. (https://affectablesleep.com).

I have a folding phone. It isn't devoid of design. The design makes it function.

I think the article is confusing ornamentation with industrial design.

My laptop (Asus something) has a ceramic something finish with some etching on it. That's ornamentation. It's feel. Same with the speaker grill holes, they have some design to them.

Is it dull? It certainly isn't ground breaking. But it's pleasing, and it gets out of the way. But how much ornamentation do I want?

Most people just want the apple logo to show status. I want the non-Apple logo.

The TV example in the post doesn't really explain that we needed to have these plastic gray cases for TVs with speakers and buttons. But why was that a better look than just a screen?

To my eyes, those old TVs are ugly. But I remember when Sony brought out an interface where the channel showed up on the screen and had faded away after displaying the number, and I was blown away at how beautiful the interface was.

Additionally, my Kindle Scribe is a pretty boring slab, but I've tried buying nice pens to go with it. I don't think the Lamy (which I currently have) is a beautiful design, but it is better than the pen that comes with the device, which is devoid of any emotion.

As we move to glasses interfaces, I think we'll see a new heyday of electronics design.

Hardware is now a blank canvas for the software to flourish. Not really a bad thing.

Plus there's still Teenage Engineering if you want things that look nice when powered off :)

I don't care about mobile phone design. I want just a rectangle with a screen. Like Star Trek's PADDs and LCARS.

It's easy to romanticize a past where electronics were designed to be statements in your home or office, but I think that the reduction of glamour is more so a dialogue on the utility of these devices in a modern world.

Previously, personal computers in the home were something of a novelty that didn't necessarily have a ton of value or that value was still being discovered. And now we see that the content that is displayed on the digital screen is most of the value, and so akin to many Hollywood sci-fi takes, where the screen becomes just a piece of glass, modern technology is moving in that direction.

The device itself is not the point, but the content that the device enables access to is.

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