Shanel Wu

They/them. PhD student: smart textiles, weaving, computational craft, hardware hacking.

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3 September 2019

Designing Solutions to the Apple TV Remote

by Shanel

Design charrette - inspired by Don Norman’s work, a short, collaborative meeting to quickly collaborate on or sketch ideas in order to share a broad diversity of design ideas. Our task: redesign the Apple TV Remote.

The Problem

The Apple TV remote is often blasted for it’s all-form-no-function design. It’s sleek, minimal, and versatile with 4 simple buttons including home and volume, and an integrated touch gesture sensor. The design in general is almost perfectly symmetrical visually and tactilely, which confuses many users, causing them to pick it up the wrong way or accidentally touch the gesture sensor.

The Team

Mengchen, Lucy, and Shanel

The Results

We unfortunately didn’t sketch any of our ideas out, just scribbled the words on paper/screen. We converged on our most drastic, maybe even extreme ideas to get rid of the whole remote. Instead, we would design the Apple TV to sync with other Apple smart devices, such as a watch, phone, or laptop. We stuck with this direction because we all felt strongly that the TV-remote paradigm is in the process of being replaced by the PC/laptop-streaming paradigm. Millenials are killing TV’s.

The Process

My individual ideas

Meeting as a group