The Experience Stack
Olinda is a digital radio Schulze & Webb is building for the BBC.
It’s a product prototype—we won’t make many, but what we do make is created close enough to the actual electronics in use that manufacturers could put the ideas into production inside 9 months. That’s the intention, anyway.
It’s a digital radio as digital radios could be. we’ve been task-oriented, for example, so instead of those preset buttons on the front that you have to programme, it datamines your listening habits and gives you a single “most listened” button to have. This button cycles through your top 5 most listened stations, excluding the one you’re currently listening. That means the most common task of switching between two stations is as simple as hitting most listened, then hitting retune. To switch back to the previous station: hit most listening, then hit retune. the same action.
It’s like the command-tab keystroke on the Mac to switch to the most recently used application. The common case switching quickly back and forth between two apps is the simplest movement.
This is a photograph from some of our experiments in form design, using a combination of carpentry and illustration.