"10,000 SONGS IN YOUR POCKET": The iPod® as a Transportable Environment
Prasad Boradkar is Guest-Curator of Rewind Remix Replay: Design, Music & Everyday Experience and Associate Professor & Program Director of Industrial Design at Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University.
The rapid advancement of digital technology has caused a definite and steady miniaturization and dematerialization of objects, shorter design cycle times due to faster communications, and modified processes leading to technologically informed forms in the realm of product design. This has led to the birth of a host of portable products such as personal stereos (the Walkman, Discman, iPod, etc.), cellular telephones, personal digital assistants, etc. These objects, which have become indispensable in certain social groups, are capable of creating transportable environments and movable experiences regardless of where they are used.
One such device that has captured the public imagination is the iPod, the MP3 player from Apple Computer. The success of the iPod is owed partly to the growing popularity of a new format called MP3, a digital audio file that can be easily transported over the Internet. Advertised with the tag line “10,000 Songs in Your Pocket,” this small gadget allows people to carry their entire music collections on their person. This project attempts to understand the various dimensions of the transportable environment created by the iPod and of lived phenomena, such as portable listening, using critical theories and empirical methods.
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