I won’t give any of these ‘designs’ houseroom, nor ‘officeroom.’
I just want the router to work, I don’t want a talking point / feature.

Sorry to add to the naysayers but doesn’t this miss point. In the future won’t the routers be hidden completely. We want them smaller but with stronger, faster signals. We don’t want them as pieces of furniture. Small and flexible like the trajectory of the phone.

totally agree with the previous 4 comments. the routers should be made smaller, not bigger. then people can hide them easily however they like. not that they’re particularly difficult to hide nowadays anyway.

I’m not sure why they bothered to with these designs. maybe they could reinvent the wheel.

if Talk Talk offered them free: they’d be more expensive to make therefore Talk Talk would have to pay more for the router which they will pass on to the customer.

Wow, these routers are so far wide of the mark it’s crazy.

What I want from my router, is for it to be a hub for all the devices in my home. I want to be able to login to the web-based admin page on my router (eg 192.168.0.1) and see a overview of everything that’s going on in my home. Water, electricity, gas and bandwidth usage, with the ability to drill down into the data and see usage per device (tap, power outlet, computer etc).

The router has come as far as it can in it’s current form. We need some WiFi enabled sensors (water meter, electricity meter etc) that can hook up to the router to start doing more useful things.

What I don’t want is a massive clock or a table.

These designs are clearly by people with no understanding of technology.

It feels like the whole reason for routers existing has been ignored in the pursuit of treating them as art.

Objet D’art these may be, but there seems to be no technical thought or design behind these pieces. They may as well just be pieces of furniture or art because it makes much more practical sense to hide routers as much as possible rather than make a center piece of them.

Why on earth would you want a router to take “pride of place”? If anything, we will see router sizes decreasing with the reduction in size of the component parts as technology advances. This will make it easier to integrate them into peoples homes to the point that they are completely invisible.

The only valuable idea in that video was energy efficiency. This is easily solved through software, not hardware. Using wake-on-lan technology it’s possible to minimize the amount of power a router uses based on whether there are devices connected to it, turning off the router after a set period of time, and turning it on when a device reconnects.

I’m a little disappointed that there is no discussion of the software that these routers run. This is as significant as the hardware itself, it not more so.

I disagree, I think that some of them are kind of cool, I could go for the energy saving router. I like the jellyfish but have no idea where it would fit into any home. The clock is just silly. All that said, I’m never going to pay for one when the basic routers are free (and they WILL be charging for these if they release, they aren’t going to be cheap to make. Personally, I’d still always take the router with the best signal over any of these. Of course, larger designs have potential for larger aerials, but I don’t see that mentioned, so I’m guessing they’ve been thinking too much “form over function”.

@Leks

I am a writer and my partner is a fine artist. Last night we wiled away the evening watching a documentary about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. We are the exact type of “arty” pretentious gits these router designs are aimed at. They are still rubbish.

Leks,

I think you are mistaking opinion with education. While I think you are genuine in your appreciation of these designs, I think you are fundamentally missing peoples’ issue here and turning it into some non-existent art vs design nonsense.

Routers are cheap, replaceable electronics, prone to failure and replacement. Whereas art pieces are buy-once, own-forever. The problem is that these objects (apart from the energy-saver) are a mixture of both; cheap electronics and expensive blobs of matter. There is a fundamental mismatch of both purpose and value.

What happens when my new router fails? Can I upgrade it? Do I a) need to buy a whole new piece of furniture? Or b) just replace the router-component of the object?

a) is wasteful, and completely misses the benefits of mass produced electronics

b) invalidates the central purpose of the project, and turns the objects into over-elaborate router docks

Routers are already small, lightweight and cheap; as others have said, why make them bigger or more resource-heavy? It seems far more beneficial to design them smaller to the point of invisibility, or to further integrate them into other objects that are actually wifi-related (like smart appliances), rather than make them more ostentatious with no real benefit.

What is the point in adding a load of superfluous metal and plastic onto a perfectly functional (and ever more discreet) tool? Apart from the energy-saver design, these routers are nothing more than novelty bottle openers.

I can already feel the bruises from that key holder router. All the bad action movies have a scene in some warehouse where sharp pointy things stick out inexplicably from the wall. The villain always ends up impaled on one of these. This router would fit right in.

Sorry just design a simple router that will work as well as something like the Netgear DG834 range. That works efficiently and is as compact as reasonable for it purpose. The is not one of these that I would give house room to even if it was given free.

I was expecting standard router sized objects with some kind of modern/art deco mantlepiece like sculpturing on top of if not pieces of furniture that take up large amounts of space and look rather garish.

I agree with most of the others that miniaturization is the way to go.

Wouldn’t a FutureRouter be ‘invisible’ in a sense, I would build it into the fabric of the building (new build obviously), or integrate it into a fridge (see smart fridges, Wired 1998), or other useful device that every home would need - I don’t need a jellyfish!

I think the reason they went to a place like Goldsmiths for the aesthetics and innovation rather than practicality. Most of the geeks on here are totally missing the point. Engaging cross-disciplinary appraoch like this is how you innovate.

They are CONCEPTS, which is, sadly, a ‘concept’ most people here don’t seem to understand.

I like this concept, specially the clock and the energy saver router

OK, these may seem a waste of money, but this is the way we progress design, once people have accepted the use and functionality of the product, in this case a router, then we move on and start to incorporate design as a way of keeping the lifespan of a product going forward. Since there is little further progress in the functionality design, we now have to consider an aesthetics approach. Just think of all the gadgets that we can now plug into the usb ports we have. The have gone from the useful and necessary, to the fun to have, but we do buy them.

Give the move towards Wireless away from cabled routers, I would have liked to see more thought given in the design process to integration into the home, a bit like the latest flat panel art-print speakers etc.

The logic of its techie then hide it out the way is a reasonable approach, but sometimes it takes an exercise like this to come up with newer derivations of products, lets face it, do we really need a flash drive thats looks liker homer simpson, NO, but now its not just a techie gadget anymore, but also a piece of fun art that we can still use its base functionallity for, but also get a bit of a giggle and lift out of, even for only a few moments.

Remember this, all cars are still the base design of a model T, well at each corner and an engine, but look at the “extras” we have on them today, most are now standard as the customers has grown to expect progress in design, sometimes this is functional, ie anti-lock breaks, sometimes it purely design cosmetics, ie the panoramic roof windscreen, lets face it you drive looking at the stars, but it looks good so we buy it.

So lets give ourselves a bit more latitude on this process. I like the idea of combining art or design into mundane items, it means I can buy a functional tool and a piece of art, furniture, fun gizmo etc at the same time.

OK, mundane bit over, my choice would not be any of the designs, not cause there bad, but because they are not my taste, BUT, I love the idea that someone is thinking outside the box with these bits of kit.

How about morphing the router/modem with say, a retro style radio, thats got dab and internet capabilities so that its all in one piece of kit.

Maybe have it combined with a telephone base unit, or maybe just give it a new home functionality, (but not a key holder) say as a lamp unit,

I don’t know the answers, but I do admire out of the box thinking.