Live@ICFF, Editor’s Pick: The iLog

Metropolis’s senior editor is charmed by a deliberately crude prototype.

For better or for worse, Judson Beaumont is the master of the design pun. And the Vancouver-based designer has a soft spot for the worst. His Bad Table, for example, naughtily raises a leg to pee on your carpet. He also sexed up storage in the form of the Little Black Dresser. But this year (his ninth as an exhibitor), I was charmed by a deliberately crude prototype: the iLog. Apple’s sleek MP3 player sticks up out of a sawed-off bark-covered stick, with speaker holes drilled in each end. It’s too loud at the Javits center to get a sense of the sound. (Besides, the piece is a prototype: Beaumont is looking for an interested party to handle the electrical components.) But I’m totally sold by Beaumont’s vision of the the unit playing in a fireplace, screen glowing warmly. “Docking stations are all big and plastic with no personality,” he says. “I wanted to take something hard and white and warm it up.”

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