Flip-shade
Fun headphones that provide shade.
Industrial Design
Lifestyle Product Design, CMF, AI, Exploration
Individual Project, 2025
Duration: 3 weeks
Tools: Rhino, Key Shot, Vizcom, Gemini, Sketching
Brief: To create headphones that are fun, expressive and go beyond their purpose.
About the project:
A personal exploration on headphones and their potential to be more than a device for listening,
After (accidentally) breaking my favorite headphones, I started thinking (with a heavy heart) about what could've made them better. I realized that whenever I went out, I wore these headphones, but always forgot my cap for sun shade at home. Not just that, as a person who wears glasses, my ears get tired from carrying both the glasses and headphones all the time. I started thinking and a few ideas started to strike, what if my headphones did more than play music while I went for walks, ran errands in the sun, or just wanted to make a cool fashion statement?
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Let's begin the project by taking a moment to grieve the death of my favorite headphones.
...anyways
I began the project by understanding how headphones work by tearing apart the ones I broke a year ago. What all goes inside them? How are they made? What are they made of?
This search showed me just how many headphones have been designed all around the world!
How do I make the ones I am designing special?
I made a pin up board of all the head-accessories I found interesting and futuristic. However, I noted that most of them were pretty dull and neutral. While that is part of their appeal in isolation, in a collection, all of them looked the same...
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Suddenly, an idea struck... where do I wear my headphones the most outside of work/home? During transit and outdoors!
What if I combined things I wear outside with my headphones?
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😎
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Ideation time: Quick sketches for ideation and form.
The selected form was based off of the following key words:
Playful
Retro Futuristic
Soft
Cute
CAD development, although these headphones are not ergonomic as this was a quick exercise, I used a human head model (from GrabCAD) to check the proportions.
Since I observed how boring futuristic headphones looked in black and silver, so to explore the full spectrum, I decided to use Vizcom to help me find the perfect CMF options.
It was interesting to experiment with different prompts and quickly visualize what type of colors and finishes suited the product most.
I went ahead with these directions in keyshot to come up with the final combinations.
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The outer cup rotates to change the angle of the cap and shade attachment wire.
How they work
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A simple snap to fit mechanism using magnetic snap buttons.
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Cup placement adjustability according to the head size.
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Face adjustability, by allowing the user to pull the wire closer to their forehead.
Customizable fitting, with multiple possibilities and scope to add more in the future.
In context renders made with the help of Gemini, showing the possibility of how these headphones can translate in real life.
