Description

The talby concept proposed a unibody form carved from a single sheet of aluminum. At the time, while cutting processes were sometimes used for prototypes, they were not considered realistic for mass production due to time and cost constraints. In bringing talby to market, the greatest challenge was how to realize the concept’s elegant unibody form. Reproduction using aluminum press processing was first considered, but this approach was abandoned because seams would appear along the sides.
Ultimately, priority was given not to the use of aluminum itself, but to achieving a unibody form, and a unibody-like shape was realized using resin. The true revolution of applying cutting processes to mass-produced products would later be achieved by Apple: the MacBook Air (2008) became the first product to realize an aluminum unibody through machining. At the time of talby, such a future seemed like a distant dream. Yet, holding talby in hand, the team would casually remark, “Next, we’d like to do a mobile phone project with Apple,” imagining what had yet to come.

【Awards】
2004: Good Design Award
2005: Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award (USA)

【Collections】
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (FNAC), Paris
Design Museum, London
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

Source: Sunahara, Satoshi (2017). *Keitai no Keitaigaku [The Morphology of Mobile Phones]*. Rokuyosha.