Pandora’s box is passe. A new generation of products has made right angles for squares only. The shape of things to come appeals to consumers becasue it’s sophisticated yet comforting, designers say. Function follows. : Curve Appeal

Curves are cool. Right angles are square.

Look, and you’ll see a world going round. Appliances, electronics, furniture and housewares with undulating lines and soft shapes have been replacing the sharp-cornered designs of recent years.

Boomboxes, once as solidly rectangular as a brick, look like knackwurst. Remote controls with all the grace of a 3-by-5 card have been transformed into palm-sized ovoids. And overstuffed couches--slipcovered in antique fruit-print dish towels--are far more fashionable than sleek, black leather sofas.

The curving trend goes beyond the home and into the driveway, where cars, shoe box-shaped only a decade ago, have become roly-poly jelly beans.

This new generation of curvy products is popular with consumers, who find the look sophisticated yet comforting, designers say. A soft edge is more humanistic than a hard one.

“People want friendlier products,” explains Martin Smith, chairman of product and industrial design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

But what really drives the curves is economics. Curvilinear shapes look new, and new shapes sell old products. Computer-aided design makes sinuous shapes easy to conceive and affords a more intricate end product. And because these curvy shapes require complicated tooling, manufacturers have fewer problems with cheap imitations flooding the market, says Herbert Tyrnauer, chairman of the design department at Cal State Long Beach.

Although designers’ infatuation with curves has been cresting for several years, it shows no signs of slacking off.

“Most product design periods run four to five years,” says Tim Brown, director of the San Francisco branch of IDEO, an international product and industrial design firm. “Whenever it is just a design trend, it will reach a high point and fade away. If there is a sound reason for the trend, it can last longer.”

In the past, products were shaped by their internal mechanics.

“In the ‘40s and ‘50s, most products were mechanical,” Smith says. “In the ‘60s and ‘70s, they were electrical and mechanical. The ‘80s and ‘90s saw things become digital. . . . The mechanical nature no longer dictates the shape.”

The digital electronics that run answering machines, coffee makers and portable telephones also aid the manufacturing process. Because product parts no longer have to fit a universal standard, companies can produce novelty designs in small quantities without going broke.

The low start-up costs and quick turnaround of computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing open the door for bright colors and unusual sizes, shapes and hybrid combinations. A telephone, for example, could take the form of a hot-pink plastic high-heel pump or a curvaceous compact desktop fax/answering machine/telephone.

Where digital technology liberated designers, CAD/CAM freed manufacturers. They can now indulge in making secondary products to advertise their primary wares.

Go Video, a Scottsdale, Ariz., electronics firm, recently introduced a dual-deck VCR system--a model that could copy videotapes. But the accompanying remote control was too complicated.

“We needed something simple,” says Ed Brachocki, vice president of marketing for the company, “something that would work with our VCR, have a broad application and would appeal to the mass market.”

Translation: an inexpensive remote for the channel surfer--one with an on-off control, volume regulator and channel changer--that would work with the Go system and others. This product would put the name of the new company in many hands.

The company contacted Doug Patton, an Irvine-based industrial/product/software designer who had created a pen-shaped remote for Mitsubishi. He considered more than 50 designs, looking at every possible shape.

“When I design, I think about the design 24 hours a day,” Patton says. “Everything I look at it has possibilities. It’s a design tool called forced linking.

“One day when I went surfing, I was sitting on the beach picking up ocean rocks and skipping them. I thought, ‘Hey, this shape feels good.’ I took a bunch of the rounded rocks and started sketching.” The result was a palm-sized remote control that resembles a flattened egg.

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Louie Jones also breaks the box at every opportunity.

“It’s rare that you ever see anything with a straight line in my collection,” says the Laguna Beach furniture designer. His $4,000 chest of drawers is like a flame, a bright, red, twisting teardrop that flicks the ceiling. A one-of-a-kind, eight-foot-tall birch highboy resembles more a viola than a piece of furniture.

“There is something sexy about curves. Adding curves to pieces gives them a life form,” Jones says.

If nothing else, the shape of a product should make the user feel good, or the shape should feel good as it is being used. Evoking the warm-fuzzies is now part of the design criterion, designers say.

“When the form is set free, products can have a sense of emotional content,” Smith says.

This is where the new and useful will stand out from the merely clever. Over the long haul, the practical and easy-to-use products, no matter what their shape, will outlast gimmicky ones, such as shoe-shaped phones.

“Design has moved beyond just designing tools for functionality,” Brown says. “Tools are about experience. They have to give value to our lives. People don’t change much from decade to decade. Products that connect to people last longer than ones that are merely a design trend.”

Pandora’s box is passe. A new generation of products has made right angles for squares only. The shape of things to come appeals to consumers because it’s sophisticated yet comforting, designers say. Function follows.