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Indent Is Dialed Into Simplicity

Pinja Piira, a student at the Royal College of Art, sent us her MA graduation project, Indent, a music player with an ingenious new take on the audio knob interface.

Described as a “tangible audio player”, Piira has liberated the tried and true knob interface, detaching it from the speaker body and turning it into a modular and app-customizable listening experience. The top of the speaker offers four indentations to accommodate for the knob, each corresponding with a user-programmed playlist or radio station. Once placed on a surface nearby or onto an indentation, users can control the volume with a twist or stop/play music with a tap.

Indent reflects the migration of informational data away from physical devices with set-up handled by a mobile app, and thusly decluttering the interface from extraneous buttons or screens. The result is a device that pares down a user’s physical interaction with an object to the most basic of movements: twist, tap, pick up, drop.

Indent-02_close_up

Indent-03_modularity

Indent-04_concept parts

Indent-05_board and knob

Indent-06_mobile application

Indent-07_knob scale

Indent-08_bedside table

Indent-09_prototyping

Gregory Han is a Senior Editor at Design Milk. A Los Angeles native with a profound love and curiosity for design, hiking, tide pools, and road trips, a selection of his adventures and musings can be found at gregoryhan.com.