Radio Urbana 106.9 FM

Concept

A music station does not compete on content —the songs are the same everywhere— but on who you feel part of. In 2010, the FM station that wanted the twenty-somethings did not win by listing tracks: it won by looking like the place where that music gets decided. So the site puts you on the other side of the glass. The first thing you see is not a logo or a menu: it is the desk, with the VU meters lit and ON AIR in green above. And the sections are not menu items: they are tags resting on the groups of faders.

Below that, what a listener actually looks for: the schedule with times, the Top 40 chart presented in an audio rack with a play button per track, and the gallery of party photographs in stacked polaroids — that gallery is what turns the station into a scene: listeners come in to find themselves in Saturday's photos. "Make your own music" is the most ambitious piece: you pick a rhythm and put something together yourself. A station whose claim is "let's respect music" handing the listener an instrument instead of a form. And the live player is fixed at the top, always one click away.

Photorealistic audio equipment: brushed metal, rubber, speaker cloth, hex screws. The modules are not boxes, they are racks with their RCA connectors in view. A black palette with electric cyan as the only colour, except for the green of the ON AIR sign, because that is how the real signs look. It is the work with the most period-specific skin in the archive —photorealistic texture was the language of 2010— and at the same time the one that best understands its field: a radio station's interface built from a radio station's objects.