Essential Home
July 2018
Regularly meeting with Essentials CEO, myself and the respected ID team were tasked with carrying out Essentials vision of the connected home ecosystem. As appointed design lead I was responsible for curating a compelling, rational design story for the in-home user and executing industrial design intent for MFG. This included many trips overseas working alongside numerous partners, adapting design to engineering constraints, sourcing & determining suitable materials, creating & presenting visual presentations, PRD/CMF documentation, and so on… Despite the product developing into something special, the project was canceled after the EVT1 build due to a company shift towards focusing on other favorable projects.
Team: Kevin Hoffman, Dave Evans, Linda Jiang, Clement Puertolas, Farzin Dehmoubed, Chris Coley
With the best of voice and touchscreen interactions, Essential Home was designed to intuitively control every part of a connected home.
The OLED circular touch display was designed to sit at a 12° angle, suitable for both touch interaction and reading content from a distance.
Behind a seamless, knitted fabric is a 30W full range nine speaker system that delivers surprising 360° sound quality, in a small package.
We met with fabric suppliers exploring a variety of different fabrics… Eventually choosing a warp knitted, straight & spun steamed yarn combination that has a minimal perceived pattern directionality, an important characteristic for a fabric that wraps around the rather organic Home form.
Paired with a 6 microphone, radar sensing system, Home has a pleasantly intelligent presence… and a series of constraints to be designed around.
The housing had to be extremely acoustic and radar transparent, a key driver in the part placement and breakup of the product.
Homes form mocks the natural gesture of a resting water droplet. These contact angles quantify the surfaces it rests on.
