I headed down to Digital Well Being’s showroom this afternoon and had an interesting chat with Alexander Grünsteidl, dwb’s co-founder along with Priya Prakash.

I was pleasantly surprised to see some items on sale which I didn’t even know were real products. For example, the tiny MY WAY printer that IDEO designed for Olivetti, which I’d seen in magazines but had no idea was actually for sale. Also an ebook-reader by iRex technologies with a beautiful little hi-res/greyscale e-ink display that looked like a printed surface — I thought this looked far better when Alexander showed it to me displaying text, rather than the images that were loaded up for display otherwise.

[ update: The My Way printer got the 2006 Best Consumer Product award from Design Week... apparently our own Tom Hulbert did the interface design on this. Well done Tom! ]

There was quite a wide range of stuff, from definite stocking-fillers like Random International’s pixeltape, through Hulger phones and the ubiquitous (get it?) Nabaztag rabbit, to stuff that’s less obviously commercial such as Roger Ibars’ Hard-Wired Devices. All very carefully-selected though, and very much a showroom rather than an Akihabara electronics store (or its online equivalent for that matter). The theme of the current display is “black and white”, whereas the next one will be based on “nature”.

Apparently the Philips digital picture frame is their biggest-selling item, despite it being widely-available in other stores in the UK – but Alexander says that people just haven’t seen them.

I guess this is partly the reason why DWB are doing what they do… so much of the output of interactive product design/interaction design gets disseminated as very polished prototypes or concept videos or pictures in glossy magazines, and unless you see them in real life or meet the designers it’s very hard to know which of these things are actually available to buy… it’s probably easier with art pieces, as at least there’s an expectation that you’re looking at a one-off (or a limited-edition run). Whereas with design, the recent advances in small-scale manufacturing, rapid-prototyping and personal CAM have changed the playing field so much that designers can cover the whole spectrum, from concept images/videos, to one-offs and limited runs, to being able to rapidly tool up for runs of thousands.

Interestingly Alexander said that a large part of the challenge with running a store like this is in negotiating distribution – he reckoned Argos have a much easier time of it.

Despite the dates shown on their website, their store will still be open beyond the end of the London Design Festival — at least until Xmas (which I can imagine being a busy time for them).