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.
