RNA Design

30/03/2026

https://www.dw.com/en/the-german-village-running-on-its-own-juice/a-76395682 #:~:text=Frustrated%20by%20a%20system%20that,willing%20partner%20from%20early%20on.

10/02/2026

Strike a pose with Yves Saint Laurent's iconic De Stijl collection in front of a Piet Mondrian composition, 1966.

13/01/2026

https://designwanted.com/the-present-scott-thrift/

Ignoring seconds, minutes, and hours, Scott Thrift’s ‘time giving gifts’ chart the cycles of the day, the year, and the

07/01/2026

Best Wishes from the 'wishing bell'

26/10/2025

Design that moves! Recycled nylon curtain 'Beyond the Frame' by

24/10/2025

Bathing in Color! Raw Color x RAL
The functionality of colors

11/09/2025

The future is BMW iX5 Hydrogen: “Simply, 2025” by Alvaro Barrington

08/09/2025

Digital cameras back! SIGMA BF aluminum unibody crafted from a single aluminum block, limiting production to 9 units daily! Aluminum’s infinite recyclability preserves quality and integrity.

24/06/2025

23/06/2025

Born On This Day June 21 1926 Louis Ottens, Dutch engineer, developed the audio cassette tape, and worked on the compact disc, born in Bellingwolde, Netherlands (d. 2021)

Lodewijk Frederik Ottens (21 June 1926 – 6 March 2021) was a Dutch engineer and inventor, best known as the inventor of the cassette tape, and for his work in helping to develop the compact disc. Ottens was employed by Philips for the entirety of his career.

Building on the success of the EL 3585, Philips Hasselt started working on plans to develop a portable cassette recorder. The goal for this "pocket recorder," as it was nicknamed, was to be inexpensive and small, with low battery consumption but reasonable sound quality. Originally, Philips planned on working with RCA and using their RCA tape cartridge system cassette, but Ottens found that the dimensions and tape speed of the set made it not suitable for their desired product.

Philips eventually decided to develop their own cassette, with RCA's cassette as a starting point. Ottens started the design of the cassette by cutting a block of wood to fit into his jacket pocket. This wood block would become the model for what became the first portable cassette recorder, the EL 3300.
Ottens managed a team of ten or twelve workers who had experience in designing gramophones and tape recorders to develop the cassette and its equipment. While developing the cassette, the group often utilized resources and knowledge from the nearby Eindhoven location.

In 1963, Philips decided to publicly introduce the cassette system at IFA Berlin. This introduction was not immediately very widely received and did not spark much interest among those in the audio world. However, some photos were taken of the system, which would later be used in the production of Japanese copies of Ottens' system, which were notably larger in size than the original. Wilhelmus F.A. Heylands, a Dutch civil engineer and inventor in Ottens' team at Philips Hasselt, who graduated from TH Aachen (Germany), often explained that the reason for Philips' breakthrough with the Compact Cassette, was the fact that they offered this patent and invention for free to other manufacturers of similar hardware such as National and Sony. Without this, the Compact Cassette would have never become the world standard. Heylands was born on the same day as Lou Ottens.