Continuing on the headphones theme from my previous post:
Ginevra was surfing around on some blogs (as we do) and came across a post about Nokia's "Music Almighty Headset Competition" that challenges you to design some sort of fantasy set of headphones, and Nokia will produce the winners. (There's a "social media" component where entrants drive traffic to the site by haranguing friends to vote for their design.) She sent me the link to amuse me.
The post provided a sample design, presumably to inspire some submissions:
I cannot stop staring at this image.
The contest website (located at the awful URL here) features some appalling 3-D animations of similarly "inspiring" monstrosities, in case you need to get your creative juices flowing.
I have so many questions:
- Whose idea was this?
- How did they get the rest of Nokia to approve it?
- Nokia makes headphones?
- I thought part of the benefits of advancing technology was that all gadgets get increasingly smaller and more discreet. What does it say about Nokia's technology to create larger, heavier, more obtrusive headphones?
- Would anyone wear these headphones?
- Why are they adorned with sound-amplifying flourishes in the form of mic heads, organ pipes and little foghorns?
- Seriously, would anyone wear these headphones?
I suppose now that I have blogged about this, Nokia wins. (Although, now that I do know they make headphones, they still haven't made my short list of "companies to buy headphones from".)
They promise to manufacture fully functioning custom-made ("bespoke" as the Brits say) sets from the top 5 winning designs to display in their stores then award to the winners. No plans to manufacture them en masse. So I'm choosing to see this more as an art competition.
In which case, I'm voting for these:
Because I need some tiny megaphones to blare music directly into the back of my neck, whilst the white tiger just dares you to make fun of the fact that I'm listening to "Endless Love" by Diana Ross & Lionel Ritchie.