Bauhaus Archive Exhibit Throws New light on Sony's Unfulfilled MiniDisc Plans
An exhibition showing at the Bauhaus Archive Museum of Design in Berlin, devoted to the work of U.K. industrial designer Jasper Morrison, throws new light on Sony's unfulfilled plans for MiniDisc (MD) in the late 1990s. The exhibition, called Thingness,…
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chronicles Morrison's work over 35 years with furniture, cooking utensils, tableware series, lamps, clocks and other everyday objects. Though there are physical examples of most of his designs, one commissioned by Sony Europe in 1998 exists in the exhibit only as a small, poor-quality captioned photo of a stylish tabletop audio system. Sony hired Morrison to design “a top of the range family of products, from TV to HiFi,” says the caption. Morrison came up with a system that allowed the HiFi to be mounted vertically on an aluminum base “or simply unhooked and laid flat, in a more traditional arrangement,” it says. Its “sideways slot” for MiniDiscs “seemed nicely expressive of the function of recording” from CD to MD, it says. “We never really discovered why the project was stopped." Sony launched MD in 1992, and though it was popular with consumers in Japan, several factors ultimately doomed the format, including reluctance of the major record labels to embrace it as a prerecorded medium. Sony sold the last of its MD players in 2013.