Controls of the Future: An exploration of abstracting past nostalgic objects into modern wearables.

As cyberspace and the internet is becoming more and more entrenched in the way humans interact with their physical environment, the push for creating innovation linked to our natural rhythms to make seamless interactions between the physical and meta-verse will drastically shift how we engage with technology. With medical regulators like the heart rate monitor and technology like Bluetooth, our body can become inputs for innovation that fuses the two (seemingly separate) worlds. The apple watch and Fitbit are two examples of products that take our symbiotics and create outputs telling us to move our bodies, contact loved ones, or address something taking place in our physical body and personal lives. But what if this could be applied to products lost to the past?

The Sony Walkman -- the first portable music listening device -- is coveted for pathing the way to mp3 players, and now streaming platforms like Spotify and iTunes music. Today, portable music exists for the most part solely on our phones. The physicality of buttons and sliders on the walkman made it both an auditory experience and an interactive experience. How can we bring this sort of physical interaction back to the present, with the popularization of minimalist design when it comes to technology?

In this series of studies, the Sony Walkman is completely abstracted from its original form and re-imagined as another common wearable: a ring. Continuing to utilize the Walkman's physical features like buttons, the staple listening device now can slide onto the finger for an even sleeker experience. Numerous construction methods were rendered; ranging from classic ring forms to more organic sculpted models, and taking geometric patterns and manipulating them into natural curvature to fit the finger.