Innovative Designs and Devices

Steve Jobs stated once that the "design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." While this statement has proven to be crucial over thousands of years, one shouldn’t misinterpret it by emphasizing the functionality despite the design. When it comes to product design, the significance of aesthetics of a given device, the way its design looks and feels, determines the choice of the customer once the functionalities of multiple devices are more or less similar. If supported by sound user interface and a well-tested, clean implementation, innovative design solutions can drastically enhance the user experience.

This article presents innovative, futuristic gadgets, devices, designs and concepts. Unless explicitly specified, none of these cut-edge concepts is currently being manufactured. None of them is available for end-users which is why neither the price nor links to the stores are mentioned.

Please keep in mind that the main idea of this article is not to do the sell-talk for trendy products, but to showcase innovative design solutions and futuristic devices which can become reality in 2008 or over the next few years.

Duofone

The main idea behind Duofone is the possibility to put multiple devices together to combine their screen real estate. The battery power can be shared, and a movie can be watched on a larger screen.

Optimus Tactus & Optimus Maximus

Artemy Lebedev’s Optimus keyboards offer an unusual approach for a traditional input device. A small OLED-display (Organic Display) is placed beneath every key to enable users to define displayed characters and the keys’ functionality manually. In other words, with Optimus the placement of labels on the keyboard can be varied at any time.

Optimus Tactus does not have physical keys, which means there are no restrictions on their shape and size. Any part of the keyboard surface can be programmed to perform any function or to display any images. Production date and price: unknown.

Optimus Maximus (Demo). Each of the 113 keys is a stand-alone display that shows the function currently assigned to it. Optimus’s customizable layout allows convenient use of any language — Cyrillic, Ancient Greek, Georgian, Arabic, Quenya, hiragana, etc. — as well as of any other character sets: notes, numerals, special symbols, HTML codes, math functions and so on to infinity. Production date: the end of January 2008, price: 460$.