Jacobsen Radio

I was once asked to design a radio. As always, when I set out to create a product or sketch an idea, I find a form that I feel would be appropriate. I collect forms, whether I am at home, going for a walk or travelling. A butterfly, a pebble on the beach, a glittering reflection in a wave. I scan these forms mentally and use them in my designs.

My first trip, as a young backpacker, takes me to China and Hong Kong. And here, for the first time, I see a proper city, with skyscrapers forming a virtual sculpture park. One building in particular sticks in my mind. Tall, rectilinear, black, with a sloping roof. An interesting form that I reuse many years later in the radio, which is a scaled-down version of the towering building, complete with the angled roof. The radio’s sloping ‘roof’ is black, like the building’s, and acts as a kind of mirror that offers a beautiful surface for lights and reflections. That makes the angled plane a good choice for a user interface, where the surface is almost like a starry sky with red dots you can push to activate functions. I wanted to create a user interface that is extremely easy to use and provides optimal clarity as a way of moving the focus away from the technical features and towards the poetic process of scrolling and searching for musical memories.

When it was time to present the radio to the client, I took a milk carton, made an angled incision, inserted a panel and painted the model white. Could we make a radio that looked like that? The manufacturer liked the form but wondered about volume and sound quality. The task, then, was to preserve the clear, sculpted form while enabling sound that had both width and depth, using the most updated loudspeaker technology.

The radio began to take shape. Before it was finished, we presented the model to a number of clients while playing music from a different sound system entirely, simply to illustrate the combination of form and sound. To our great surprise, we received 180,000 pre-orders. That year, the radio was the most popular choice in Denmark for corporate Christmas presents. The packaging was an important part of the experience. The radio had to be as exciting to unbox as a pair of expensive shoes, offering a complete experience from the actual product to the packaging and the user manual.