Sonos recently released a new limited edition offering of their flagship PLAY:1 wireless speaker—the Tone is a monochromatic matte black or white speaker in a soft touch finish. To celebrate the release of the newest member of Sonos' suite of products, Core77 spoke to the Tad Toulis, Vice President of Design at Sonos and Core77 contributor. Toulis shares insight on the design process, the challenges facing designers working in consumer audio, and why he's recently been fascinated with Scandinavian design.
**Read more with Tad Toulis in the Core77 Questionnaire
Tad Toulis: With design at Sonos, we ask ourselves: How do audio products—in this time and place—appear in the world in a way that dovetails with what's happening in technology and sound? From a design perspective, there's a lot of ways to do that. Our number one challenge as a company is that we live in a bunch of environments that we can't control. So we have to design in a way that fits in and stands out in a range of contexts.
With limited edition work, they're either partner driven, relationship driven or concept driven. The PLAY:1 Tone we did on our own initiative because we felt like there was something interesting to say there.
For concept editions, we try to achieve a moment of focus to take advantage of the product in a way that expresses an idea or makes you reconsider how you look at that product. After we had done the Blue Note effort, which was a deep exploration of color, I wanted to figure out a way to map out a different territory that was kind of restrained but would give us a different creative challenge. Tone started emerging because I was really interested in this idea of what the smallest change we could make that would give us the most different effect in the product. And as we started looking at that problem and doing these single color monoblocking experiments, we got purer and purer with that expression. And that idea connected with the sound quality of Sonos products.
So then the question became: How do we reconcile this idea of clear sound with this visual proposition. And when I came across the quote from John Cale that appears on the packaging, "We'd hold a chord for three hours if we could," it felt like a testimony to the highest achievement in an art form. Beyond the physical stamina that it would require, it underlines how much richness such a reduced thing could be. There's a real history of artists working with very reduced palettes that do the same thing—making you look at things differently.
A small idea, paint one white, paint one black, gives you a totally different read of the product. And that includes seeing the grill totally changed from being an element that lives between the top part and the bottom part of the speaker to being a sort of textile. With the soft touch paint, in the matte black or white, it adheres to the grill in a different way giving it a ceramic treatment—awakening how you see something differently but also connecting it to a domestic space, fitting into the home. So it's not just the consumer electronics product, but it's a domesticated object.
We treat the limited edition as a sandbox—it's experimentation, an exploratory lab for designers. I used to be a big fan of François Truffaut and he was a big critic of cinema and then he became a filmmaker. In my case, having been a consultant, having worked a bit in house and having written about design, one of the things that's great about this opportunity is to take what I've observed, built up in my experience, and say, how do we operate as a design team inside this problem space and what do we do with design? The great blessing I have is to be in this company where I sit across hardware and software and have the opportunity to deploy those ideas. That's really the opportunity. So all of it is one body of work.
Ideas are what make business work. And ideas are what make design work. The idea here is really reflecting on sound. How can we talk about ourselves in a way that connects what we are to how we want to be, visually? Design is emotional but it is also logical. Ideas make it happen but it's the experiment in deployment.
I've recently been really fascinated with Scandinavian design because it is rational with an emotional twist. And that is the wavelength we're trying to mine. We have a phenomenal technical spine, we have phenomenal acoustic performance and we want to deliver an incredible design solution that has a point of view while working with those parts.
The limited edition PLAY:1 Tone is now available at Sonos.com.
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