n the Internet age, radio can seem like a dusty relic back there with hand-cranked cars and rotary phones. That’s an image Etón Corp. wanted customers to tune out for its hit parade of high-tech radios and related equipment at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last January.

Instead of a typical showroom with rectangular walls as blandiose as Top 40 music, the Palo Alto, CA,-based company’s designers used multi-sided polygons to broadcast a brand image as hip as the docking stations Etón makes for Apple Inc.’s iPod. Made of aluminum wrapped with a white Spandex-like cloth, the metal shapes were arranged over the 40-by-60-foot exhibit’s white-laminate flooring like an open-air sculpture garden.

Illuminating this white-open prairie were two more nontraditional shapes suspended via an aluminum truss 20 feet over the exhibit: a 22-foot-long “snake” and a 27-foot-long “cloud.” Fluorescent lights inside the surreal shapes lit up the floor below, where display stands made of acrylic and medium-density fiberboard (MDF) featured the radios Etón co-brands with its partners, including Apple, Sirius Radio Inc., and The American Red Cross.

To focus attention on a new radio line co-branded with Germany’s Porsche Design Group, Etón partitioned off a separate exhibit compartment that, while accessible through the main area, played FM to the other side’s lighter AM. Inside it was as dark as a movie theater, with radios mounted on gray MDF pedestals under black tubes whose halogen lights shone on the radios — which looked like diamonds in a museum.

Etón hoped its open-booth concept would not only evoke the borderless nature of radio and the coolness of its product design, but also generate a 10-percent increase in visitors over the previous year. It received 50 percent more instead. Attendees, you could say, received Etón’s signal loud and clear.

Client: Etón Corp., Palo Alto, CA
Design/Fabrication: Etón Corp.
Size: 2,400 square feet
Estimated Cost: $360,000
Estimated Cost/Square Foot: $150