A Study on the Correlation Between Bang&Olufsen Audio Product Design and Product Design Characteristics of the Nordic Region

At some point in modern daily life, Nordic design began to rapidly increase as a home design preferred by people. Northern Europe has developed a unique culture due to its geographical conditions, such as adapting to nature or being friendly, focusing on indoor life, and practicality through simplicity. In this study, the characteristics of Northern European Design were derived into four types through analysis of design cases of representative Northern European countries. Nordic countries are traditionally based on practicality, and are characterized by nature-friendly purity, aesthetics of cultural background, and sustainable simplicity. Bang & Olufsen was selected as the target to examine specifically how these Nordic design characteristics were applied to actual product design and how they changed over time. Bang & Olufsen is a world-renowned audio company in Northern Europe with a 99-year history. In this study, a case study of 66 representative Bang & Olufsen products from 1926 to 2023 was conducted, and the results showed that Bang & Olufsen's audio design generally maintains the characteristics of Nordic design over time. Among the characteristics of Nordic design, simplicity and aesthetics still remain strong over time, and purity is relatively low but appears to be increasing slowly as technology advances. Despite the lack of samples of target products for case analysis and some limitations in the expert survey, this study is significant in that it presents a method for analyzing design characteristics by examining the geographical characteristics and temporal changes in product design.