Recently, Bang & Olufsen (B&O), manufacturer of a highly distinctive and exclusive range of quality audio, video and multimedia home equipment (Chapter 1.3), launched their subbrand B&O PLAY to address the Urban Creative Professional (UCP), an audience that lives life actively and is able to make large individual purchases to radiate an image of intellectuality (Chapter 2.1). The first product to be presented under the wings of B&O PLAY was the Beolit 12, a speaker marketed as portable. However, with its WiFi demanding AirPlay protocol to wirelessly amplify music and a rather weighty cabinet, the product turned out to perform best as moveable in home (Chapter 2.1). With their vision “Courage to constantly question the ordinary in search of surprising, long-lasting experiences”, B&O aimed to take today’s portable speaker to the next level. They wanted it to perform better in portability and ease of use, while maintaining the high quality standard of their acoustics. In other words, the goal was to improve product usability (Chapter 1.1). However, their ideal to move its customer with enduring magical experiences drives the company in a constant search for technological excellence. As a result, the company found interest in an user interface technology, supplied by Aito. This supplier’s piezo technology allows the seamless integration of an interface without losing its intuitivity, due to the inverse piezoelectric tactile feedback (Chapter 3). With this potentially game changing capabilities they aspire to change the perception of touch switches from simple ‘input tools’ to a rich, intuitive and powerful experience (Chapter 1.3) By implementing the Aito technology in the desired B&O speaker, the improvement of product usability could become even stronger. Therefore the design assignment became: “Design the next level high-end portable speaker by implementing the Aito technology, which should contribute to the improvement of product usability” (Chapter 1.2). With the awareness of today’s acceleration of technology development and the approaching saturation of the portable speaker’s market (Chapter 2.1), B&O aims to launch this new design in spring 2014. Therefore, it was desired to finalize the assignment with a visual prototype with working Aito technology. The assignment was divided into the following three design objectives in order to simplify the attempt to a successful completion: Integration of the Aito technology, improvement of usability in terms of the user interface and improvement of usability regarding outdoor use (Chapter 1.2). The introduction of the new technology created the possibility to approach the design process differently than IDE students are normally accustomed to (Chapter 1.4). Roberto Verganti’s ‘technology epiphany’ theory was applied to search for an innovative meaning that could radically differentiate this speaker from its predecessor. Initially, a design-driven approach was taken to explore the design context and companies’ values as well as to see what might be beyond those boundaries (Chapter 2). To achieve the latter, interpreters were addressed to discuss what meaning people could give to the evolving life context. The designer used the interpreter’s input to envision a meaning. In parallel, the technology-push approach was carried out to uncover possibly hidden meanings of the Aito technology, which could contribute to the designer’s envisioned meaning (Chapter 3). The technology’s capabilities and criteria, helpful in achieving the first objective of Aito’s technology integration, were used in combination with the already found boundaries of the design-drivers to capture the envisioned meaning into a more realistic design direction for a speaker (Chapter 4): “Design a weatherproof portable speaker that encourages the UCPs to live their life actively outside home, by providing them with the ability to take along their home comfort of socially sharing music, enabling the enduring magical experience due to social affirmation.” Moreover, a sound concept proposed by the B&O acoustic department was analysed to reveal specific product constraints that set the foundation of the product regarding dimensions and weight (Chapter 3.4). Subsequently, use-cases were addressed with the design direction in order to define the product functionalities and additional technical specifications (Chapter 5). Outdoor related functionalities ‘portability’, ‘protection’ and ‘product placement’ required a design approach to explore how they could be achieved. This contributed to the addressing of the third objective on product usability with regard to outdoor use. Moreover, B&O’s design language was elaborated to be able to still ensure a premium look (Chapter 6.3). The second objective was addressed in the design phase as well. The target audience had been interviewed in the analysis phase to discover their listening behaviour. (Chapter 2.1) The concluding requirements in combination with the capabilities of Aito’s technology resulted in several innovative user interface ideas, designed for the given time-to-market and aimed to contribute to the improvement of usability (Chapter 6.2). All knowledge and requirements resulted from the execution of the design objectives were taken into account in the ideation phase (Chapter 6.5), in which integrated design ideas were sketched. These were converted into more elaborated concepts (Chapter 6.6) which were qualitatively validated by the designer and his B&O colleagues. Parts of concepts were combined and redesigned into a final design on the basis of comments given by B&O (Chapter 6.8). The final design was embodied in a visual prototype (Chapter 8). Eventually, the development process was evaluated to verify the success of Verganti’s design approach. The conclusion was drawn that Verganti’s method did not support enough in achieving a radical innovation. The analysis of the Aito technology taught us it has the potential to become the game-changer in product user-interfaces. Therefore the technology is considered radical in itself, enabling a radical change in usability, as opposed to a radical change of the entire product meaning. Furthermore, an product evaluation on the basis of the target audience’s requirements to verify the success of the product with these critical people, concluded very positive. (Chapter 10). The thesis concludes with recommendations.