Design professor comments on boombox phenomenon

Boombox collector Lyle Owerko's hobby grew into a book titled "The Boombox Project: The Machines, the Music, and the Urban Underground." The book discusses the evolution of the design of the stereo, and ASU's Prasad Boradkar displayed some of Owerko's stereos for a recent exhibition in Scottsdale. 

Boradkar is an associate professor and program director of industrial design in ASU's School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. He compares the development "of bigger and bigger boxes to the growth of tailfins on cars in the late 1950s and early '60s."

“Obviously they didn’t do anything in terms of speeding up the car,” Boradkar said. “They became expressions of excess in American automotive culture, and in some of their designs the boomboxes became the same in audio culture.”

The exhibition Boradkar curated, Rewind Remix Replay: Design, Music and Everyday Experience, was featured at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Jan. 2-May 23, 2010.

Read the related ASU News article: Listening to music is now a solo act