A short history of portable tech told through five objects: the Braun Sixtant shaver (1962), the Nintendo Game Boy (1989), the AeroPress coffee maker (2005), Apple's AirPods (2016), and the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H9 (2017). Five different decades, the same underlying instinct — design that travels well, asks little, and lasts.
At SOTIYO, we spend a fair amount of time taking objects apart — not literally, usually, but in conversation, in research, in long arguments about why one bag closes better than another. Lately we have been looking at a specific category: portable tech. Not the newest gadgets on the shelf, but the rarer ones that stayed in daily use long enough to earn the word “icon.”
Five objects, spanning nearly sixty years — a shaver, a game console, a coffee maker, and two pairs of headphones — share less in common on paper than you might expect. None of them was the most powerful or feature-rich option available when it launched. What they had instead was restraint: a clear idea of what they were for, and the discipline to leave everything else out.
That is also where we start when we think about Human Flow. The things people carry should not compete with their day for attention. They should simply stay out of the way of it. The five objects below are a small study in how that idea has played out, decade by decade.
Here is what we found, in roughly the order they appeared.
Braun Sixtant SM 31
The Shave That Made Quiet the Whole Point
The Braun Sixtant SM 31 is a 1962 electric shaver designed by Gerd Alfred Müller and Hans Gugelot, and it remains one of the clearest early statements of the design language Braun became known for.
Dieter Rams had become head of design at Braun only the year before, but the Sixtant’s restraint also owed something to the Ulm School of Design, where Gugelot taught and helped shape an approach built on modularity, clarity, and form drawn directly from function. The shaver’s case was matte black, a genuinely unusual choice for a bathroom object in 1962, with no chrome trim competing for attention.
The foil itself was a quiet technical leap. Its hexagonal holes were created through a chemical process rather than punched by machine, giving Braun a thinner, more precise cutting surface — and turning that precision into the entire selling point. The Sixtant became Braun’s first mass-market product built fully around this new design language, and it sold at a higher price than competitors without losing customers. Good design, it turned out, did not need to shout about itself.
AeroPress
The Coffee Maker Born From One Bad Cup
The AeroPress is a manual coffee maker invented by Alan Adler, a Stanford engineering lecturer who launched the product in November 2005 after deciding that no existing method made a genuinely good single cup.
Adler had spent two decades building aerodynamic toys, including the record-setting Aerobie flying ring, when a dinner-table conversation about the trouble of brewing just one cup sent him into his garage. He built more than thirty prototypes over about two years, using air pressure rather than gravity to push water through the grounds quickly, cutting brew time from several minutes down to about one.
What made the AeroPress travel well was not the coffee alone. It is made of light, nearly unbreakable plastic, needs no electricity, and effectively cleans itself with the same motion that brews the cup: push the plunger, eject the spent puck, rinse. It is, by some distance, the easiest “real” coffee setup to pack into a bag — part of why it built such a devoted following among people who travel often and still care about their coffee.
Airpods
The Earbuds Everyone Mocked, Then Wore Anyway
Apple’s AirPods were announced on September 7, 2016, the same event where Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone, and went on sale that December.
The reaction at launch was not kind. Commentators compared the long white stems to electric toothbrush heads, and more than one outlet openly asked whether anyone would actually wear them. The skepticism made some sense: wireless earbuds with no cord linking the two sides were genuinely new, and the charging case looked unfamiliar. What made them work was less visible — a custom Apple chip that handled pairing and battery life well enough that people simply stopped thinking about the technology and used it.
Within three years, Apple’s own CEO described AirPods, in his words, as “nothing less than a cultural phenomenon.” We would put it more plainly: they removed one more small friction point from moving through a day — no wire to catch on a coat zipper, no cable to untangle on a train platform, a case small enough to disappear into a pocket alongside your keys.
Game Boy
The Console That Refused to Race Anyone
The Game Boy, released by Nintendo in 1989 under designer Gunpei Yokoi, is a handheld game console that deliberately used older, cheaper technology instead of the most advanced hardware available at the time.
Yokoi had a name for the approach: lateral thinking with withered technology, or finding inventive new uses for components that were already mature, abundant, and cheap, instead of chasing whatever was newest. The idea is said to have started on an ordinary commute, watching a bored businessman fiddle with a calculator on a train — the kind of in-between moment we think about often, where a small habit reveals something bigger.
The Game Boy ran a monochrome screen on standard AA batteries while rivals like the Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear pushed color displays that drained batteries in hours. Yokoi’s bet was that battery life, durability, and a lower price would matter more to players than a sharper screen. More than three decades later, the Game Boy remains one of the best-selling handheld consoles ever made — proof that reliable and affordable can outlast impressive.
Beoplay H9
Headphones Built to Be Opened, Not Replaced
The Beoplay H9 is a pair of over-ear wireless headphones launched in 2017 by B&O Play, the more portable-focused arm of the century-old Danish audio company Bang & Olufsen.
Bang & Olufsen has built radios and audio equipment in Denmark since 1925, when founders Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen designed a radio that ran, unusually for the time, on household current instead of batteries. Decades later, B&O Play became the company’s answer to a generation that listens on the move rather than in a living room — smaller, lighter products built for transit rather than a shelf.
The H9 paired leather and aluminum with a detail that mattered more than the materials: ear pads and a battery pack designed to be opened and swapped rather than thrown away once they wore out. A touch panel on the right earcup handled playback, with no buttons required. None of this made the H9 the best-reviewed headphone of its year — reviewers had real complaints about the touch controls — but it made a case for portable audio gear built to last through actual use, not just survive a single trip.
For the Curious
Why do designers still study objects like the Braun Sixtant or the Game Boy?
Both solved a real, specific problem with whatever materials and technology were actually available at the time, instead of chasing whatever was newest. That discipline — restraint over excess — still shapes good product design today, which is part of why design schools and brands keep returning to them decades later.
Did Braun’s design philosophy influence Apple’s products?
Broadly, yes. Dieter Rams led design at Braun for almost thirty years, and his principles — clarity, honesty, doing less but doing it better — are widely cited by designers, including Apple’s former design chief Jony Ive, as a lasting reference point.
Looked at together, these five objects do not share a decade, a country, or even a category, strictly speaking. What they share is a kind of patience: a willingness to leave things out until what remains actually earns its place. That is the same instinct we try to build into everything at SOTIYO. A product should not compete with your day for attention. It should sit quietly in your bag or your pocket until the moment you need it, then simply work. Human Flow, as we think about it, is not really about movement at all. It is about how little friction that movement should require.
If this kind of object thinking interests you, we covered similar ground in Objects That Move Us: Iconic Design for Travelers — a different set of objects, the same underlying question. Or subscribe to Roam Lines, and we’ll send the next one when it’s ready.
