iPod shuffle

red dot: best of the best
red dot award: product design 2007

Cultural asset – the evolution of form
The iPod is undoubtedly an important part of pop culture in the new century. It has become a symbol of the ease-of-use with which today personal data can be stored, accessed and managed. And it has been the clear and highly user-friendly design of the jog wheel after all that made the iPod a companion that people would want to use wherever they went. The form of the iPod family is constantly being refined and Apple has always managed to coherently develop its language of form. The iPod shuffle is the latest version that combines further miniaturisation with new aspects of user-friendliness. It weighs in at only half an ounce yet has a memory capacity of 1 GB to store some 240 songs. While other iPod models are an expression of understatement, this new model seems to have been oriented towards a faster-paced lifestyle. It is available in the blue, pink, green, orange and the original silver, and features an integrated clip which allows it to be worn on clothing. Its functionality and the layout of the controls are designed to provide extremely intuitive use: all controls are easily found by the fingers and the play, pause, skip, repeat, and shuffle functions can be controlled without having to look at the player. Hooking up and using the iPod together with the iTunes software is self-explanatory: iPod shuffle comes with a USB dock that, when plugged into a Mac or PC, connects with the iTunes software to fill the player with as many songs, audiobooks and podcasts as it can hold. This can be done automatically with just one mouse click by activating the AutoFill Function. iPod shuffle can also be used in “disk mode” as a USB flash drive to store data.