Concept device and promo website

Agency: Frog Design
Role: Senior VD + UI

This project was one of a kind. It brought together a uniquely multi-disciplinary team that blended together design research, industrial design, and visual design. Wearables have become the rage in many circles of design. Because of this intense competition and the need to fit a new demographic, Intel tapped Frog to research and develop a women’s wearable that would differentiate them from the crowd.

Through key stakeholder interviews, focus group testing and guerrilla-on-the street questioning to local fashionistas, we were able to distill our concepts into three segmented demographic needs. We defined target users and the opportunities that existed for each one, created value propositions and projected costs vs value and the client fell in love with the concept. 

Moving forward we wove the separate archetypal design stories together to create an authentic tangible “wearable” bracelet that had unique and beautiful graphics that represented different social actions of friends, events and connections. Leading visual design for the team, I created an organic UI that was incredibly versatile and dynamic, one design where a couple dots evolved into a beautiful flowering fractal or the second design which caused one shape to shift into geometric patterns. As each event took place in the users social network, fractals would emerge from the screen in predetermined growth patterns and algorithmically grow to understood shapes with understood movements, so that the user identified meaning, but other viewers only saw the beauty in the visual display.

I was constantly grounded by reality while working with our keen mechanical engineer (ME), whom we sometimes called the Magic Enabler…as well as the Dream Crusher. Thinking through which OLED or LED array was needed (which in turn meant: how to tone down my elegant ideas) was always a good gut check about feasibility. In the end we were very proud of our results, even with hiccups of client scope changes and long nights chasing deadlines. Intel has since moved forward with our original idea, fleshing it out with their marketing and strategic team, coming to a different demographic and price point. Even though the end result has changed so much from our original vision, it’s still really gratifying to know I was a part of the inception that generated the needs for the next processors for the wearable market.

Read more: Forbes, The Verge, Barney’s