While roaming the halls of CES this year we were blown away by the plethora of products, gadgets, and identities designed by Astro Studios. From the uber-current Boxee Box, Ooma Telo, Zune HD and Intel Moorestown, to the brand identity extension of Kodak Slice and the still kicking Xbox 360, Astro was in the house!
Wowing the crowds at this year’s CES was the Boxee Box designed by Astro Studios. In classic championship style, Boxee was crowned CNN’s prestigious “Last Gadget Standing” award, in addition to being awarded a finalist slot in C-NET’S “Best of Show.”
Hats off to Boxee and D-Link!
Astro Studios recently mentored a group of students at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco for the Fall 2009 semester. Lending his 20+ years in the design consultancy field, Kyle Swen, VP at Astro, had a lot to offer the students looking for credits in the course entitled Product Design IV taught by Jim Shook.
Astro Studios recently mentored a group of students at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco for the Fall 2009 semester. Lending his 20+ years in the design consultancy field, Kyle Swen, VP at Astro, had a lot to offer the students looking for credits in the course entitled Product Design IV taught by Jim Shook.
The goal of Astro sponsoring this class was to bring real-world expertise and process to the classroom. Kyle tasked the students with a project that required them to design a timepiece for a brand of their choosing. Kyle proposed the timepiece theme due to its natural blend of technology, style, and fashion. Believing that he could push the students even further, Kyle had them design the out-of-box experiences for the products as well. Kyle wanted the students to fully understand the brands and clients they were designing for, and pushed the students to define the demographic groups that the brand was trying to reach. For their finals, the students showed their presentations here at the studio, pitching their ideas to the Astro crew for critical review.
The class thrived on the invaluable “in the trenches" point-of-view from Kyle, and in return Kyle gleaned fresh zeal from the students. "It's always inspiring to see young enthusiastic talent excited about design. As working designers it re-sparks our creative engines as well”, stated Kyle.
It was truly a pleasure working with the Academy of Art University and their students. We look forward to expanded mentoring and educational collaboration in the future.
Boxee's readiness to make your living room even harder to leave is close to full fruition. Boxee – in partnership with D-link – has revealed its first hardware device called the Boxee Box.
Boxee's readiness to make your living room even harder to leave is close to full fruition. Boxee – in partnership with D-link – has revealed its first hardware device called the Boxee Box. The Boxee Box designed by Astro Studios is sleek and packed with awesome.
“We wanted to create a unique icon for Boxee; something bold that can still be respected as a piece of high-end electronics. We didn’t want to design another Pizza Box that would get lost in the stacks of your media center. We saw this box as the apex with nothing ever sitting on top of it”, says Astro Lead Designer Michel Alvarez.
The bleeding form of this jet-black cube comes complete with HDMI, an SD card slot, Wi-Fi, USB and ethernet ports easily enabling all your internet and hard drive content to display in HD on your TV. The Boxee Box is poised to hit the stores in the 2nd half of 2010, so fluff up the pillow on your La-Z Boy and get to clicking.
ASTRO recently created a series of west-coast flavored, digital experiments called BoomCast. Feeling it was time to reinvigorate the classic BoomBox form factor, ASTRO set their sights at the street level users of the future.
ASTRO recently created a series of west-coast flavored, digital experiments called BoomCast. Feeling it was time to reinvigorate the classic BoomBox form factor, ASTRO set their sights at the street level users of the future.
The BoomCast forms are flexible and designed by intertwining demographic stereotypes with modern materials and technologies. But beyond tangible product, ASTRO thinks all the players should be connected on demand, to broadcast directly to and through each other and beyond. ASTRO’s BoomCast concepts rely on digital, wireless connectivity and broadband cloud crunching.
If the original BoomBox was about sharing beats on the streets, then the BoomCast is all about broadcasting anywhere, anytime, with no boundaries respected. So spin-up San Francisco, San Diego, Portland, Oaktown, Seattle and the LBC directly.
Or mix, match, and bend time and space all together for a masterful thunderstorm. Beyond broadcasting is BOOMcasting!
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