•Introduction
Window is a desktop router for TP-LINK. External antennas answer real technical needs, but they also make a router read unmistakably as equipment. Window turns that requirement into a single architectural frame.
The project began as a studio-wide exploration under Torsten Valeur's direction, with designers across the team proposing and developing individual directions through repeated critique. Window originated with a senior designer. I proposed and developed my own directions within the same process, presenting the rationale behind them in review.
Context
Year
Client
Role
Director
Internship Project at Valeur Designers
2023
TP-LINK
Industrial Design Intern
Torsten Valeur
•Design
Four antenna volumes and the voids between them, framed as a single window.
The frame is the whole object, the openings all the way through.
Images © TP-LINK
•Two Answers
The internal architecture was largely given: a rectangular PCB below and four antennas above. The design task was to turn that technical arrangement into a coherent object.
Window starts with what is already visible. By framing the four antenna volumes together with the voids between them, it shifts the dominant reading from exposed technical elements to a single window.
The other direction starts with something less visible: signal transmission. The front remains flat and closely follows the given architecture, while the rear housing gradually curves away in profile. This changing relationship creates a rising posture, suggesting signal transmission while also forming the product’s physical support.
The two directions assign meaning in different ways. Window changes what the visible hardware is perceived to be; the other gives an invisible behaviour a physical form.
•Reflections
This project was one part of my internship at Valeur Designers. What I learned has stayed with me well beyond the project itself.
1. Back to real life.
During a feedback talk, Torsten's answer to a question about proportion sent me away from the screen. Pick things up. Feel how they are made: the size, the material, the construction, the way an edge is finished. Then ask why it is the way it is.
2. By heart.
While refining a housing curve, I asked Torsten how he had controlled the outline of the Beosound 2. He said, simply: "by heart." No formula tells you why a curve should be exactly that curve. What he told me to train was the eyes, the heart, the mind. That is where a form stops being correct and starts being alive.
