Industrial design, strategy, on-product UX
Roles - worked with design director to pitch and secure the project, client point of contact, design strategy, principal designer.
Ethnographic research, industrial design, user testing, positioning, strategy
Roles - worked with business director to pitch and secure the project, creative director leading a team of 5, client point of contact, principal designer, worked closely with our director of insights on research and strategy.
Stokke is a fantastic Norwegian children’s product brand with a strong history of great design. They hired Astro to help them break into the US market. We spent time with American parents of babies and toddlers understanding and uncovering their unique needs and desires. The big learning was that they wanted a simpler, smaller, easier-to-clean high chair than what Stokke was already offering. We designed the Clikk for children 6-36 months old and focused on ease of cleaning, assembly and super easy size transformations.
Red Dot 2020: Best of the Best
IDEA 2020 Finalist
Core77: winner - Home & Living
European Design Award
FastCo: Best Home Innovations of 2020
Industrial design, positioning, on-product UX
Roles - worked with business director to pitch and secure the project, creative director leading a team of 3, client point of contact, principal designer.
Bose came to Astro Studios to help them give form to a new hyper directional immersive audio technology. The glasses combine wireless headphones with AR to create an almost magical experience wherein the wearer can hear the world around them and high quality audio simultaneously. Our goal was to help Bose create a eyewear that people wanted to wear for the looks not just the tech. We were inspired by iconic and vintage eyewear and heritage details.
Time Magazine - Best Inventions of 2019
Industrial design
Roles - creative director leading a team of 6, client point of contact, principal designer.
HP hired Astro Studios to help redefine printers for the digital age. The original goal was to rethink the archetype of the printer to fit into contemporary homes and our digital lifestyles. Printers stand unused for much of the time until we need them most. They are then dug out of their hiding place and expected to work on command. Our goal with the new era of printers was to make them an attractive addition to the home. This meant, in the case of Tango and Tango X, creating a veil using the output tray as a sort of book cover.
Included are handful of detail images from earlier concept iterations.
iF
Spark Award Gold
Folding Camp Chair
Brand, naming, industrial design, positioning, art direction, manufacturing
Roles - self initiated project that I successfully pitched on Kickstarter.
Nature is our sanctuary. Life is simpler when you’re spending your days in the great outdoors. You should spend that precious time comfortably and with objects you’re proud to own and use. Most outdoor folding chairs are built on the cheap and without elegance. Our most loved outdoor gear is the stuff our parents and grandparents handed down to us. We cherish the durability, functional beauty and patina of these items. We designed the Field Chair to meet these same criteria.
Designed for Shape
U.S. patent number D756,195
Industrial design, positioning, strategy
Roles - creative director leading a team of 6, client point of contact, principal designer.
HP hired Astro Studios to create a new design language for their small to medium sized business printers. We developed “never stop” design language to address the modern needs of agile businesses. We developed a visual language that rooted the body of the printers to the architectural notion of a stack of pure white paper. The interactive parts of the printer reference the cloud through visual lightness and upward momentum. The language is used across the entire OfficeJet Pro line as well as other adjacent products.
NYTimes Wirecutter - The Best All-in-One Printer
2020 Red Dot
2020 iF Award
2019 Good Design Award
Time For Coffee
Industrial design, naming, branding, art direction
Roles - self initiated internal project for Astro Studios. Creative director leading a team of 3, principal designer, art director.
Created by coffee lovers for coffee lovers, the TICO brew kit is a studio concept project envisioning what the ritual of coffee could look like. Exploring Astro’s take on the modern home appliance, the team created coffee accessories that were minimal, smart and intuitive with contemporary materials and finishes. The final kit concept includes a ceramic burr grinder and pour-over dripper for two, and is a modern take on a timeless preparation method.
The TICO brand also reflects this timeless aesthetic. Playing off the phrase, “time for coffee”, TICO combines these two words to create a short and memorable name. The brand’s color and typeface is subtle enough to fit a variety of kitchens while the logo is flexible for a range of applications.
TICO. It’s time for coffee.
Sleep Never Sounded So Good
Industrial design, product development, UI, UX, app design
Roles - creative director leading a team of 2 ID and 1 UI designer, client point of contact, principal designer.
"We want to help you sleep better by masking unwanted noise in the bedroom and replacing it with soothing sounds."
We designed Bose's new sleep buds for a new target demographic: the tired wife trying to get a good night's rest next to her snoring husband. As a new product in a new push toward wellness products, we were tasked with creating a distinct design that reflected the nature of the product. We created a minimal set of in-ear buds and paired them with a subtle, monolithic charging station that elicits calm. The associate app departs from the set Bose language as we explored how they might address sleep and wellness.
Designed at ASTRO Studios
Time Magazine - Best Innovations 2018 Health and Wellness
IDEA - Excellence Awards
Smart Sock for Babies
Industrial design, strategy, product development
Roles - Lead designer on 3 person team, client point of contact.
The Owlet Smartsock is designed to be the ultimate upgrade to the baby monitor. It tracks a range of vital signs such as heart rate and oxygen intake and sends the information to parents’ smartphones, giving them piece of mind when they’re away from their baby.
Parents have always wanted help keeping an eye on their sleeping baby. As the smartphone set begins to have kids, they’re looking to see how technology can improve traditional parenting tools. Armed with that insight, we studied market trends from clothing to housewares to baby products and used that research to inform our product design process.
The Owlet Smartsock uses the same pulse-oximetry technology long used in hospitals to monitor vital signs. The sock is wirelessly connected to a base station and the user’s device and immediately sends out an alert when vital signs fluctuate.
The Owlet was designed to be an intuitive piece of technology that compliments the aesthetic of a baby’s room, attire, and accessories. It’s easy to use, comfortable to a baby’s touch, and the recharging base station even doubles as a comforting nightlight.
Designed at ASTRO Studios
Core77 Design Awards - Social Impact
Titanium Cycling Glasses
Industrial design, branding, naming, positioning, strategy, art direction
Roles - self initiated internal project for Astro Studios. Designer, naming and positioning, creative director for brand and later pitching the concept to companies like Rapha, Giro and Strava.
Premium, well-crafted and technologically advanced performance eyewear that bridges the gap between fashion and sport.
The emergence of well-tailored and hand crafted active apparel and premium goods for cyclists proves that there is a desire for gear that walks the line between sport and daily wear. Our cycling eyewear concepts take cues for manufacturing, material innovations, and styling from luxury eyewear. This produces the rigorous technical requirements required by competitive cyclists while satisfying the demands of fashion focused riders.
Designed at ASTRO Studios as a personal project
Industrial design, strategy, naming, branding, identity, photography, product development
CES Innovation Award
IDEA - Product
IDEA - Brand
IDEA - Excellence Awards
Fast Company - Innovation by Design Award
Lightweight Porteur
Art direction, curation
Roles - my good friend and past student and intern built me this beautiful bike. I sourced that parts and assembled the bike.
From CycleEXIF:
"Shape Field Office is a fresh industrial and graphic design studio in San Francisco, whose latest addition to their brand identity is this superb porteur. Shape Field Office is the husband and wife team of Karson and Mary Shadley, two highly accredited designers in their own rights.
Karson lectures in the Industrial Design department at the California College of the Arts alongsideNicholas Riddle, who runs the urban mobility program. Moving in those kind of circles, it’s no surprise that Nicholas has dabbled in the art of frame building, with a very clean single speed, belt-driven road bike already in his portfolio. Nicholas was contracted to build the Shape Field Bike, a Columbus SL frame with geometry based on Karson’s beloved 1978 Cinelli Supercorsa.
The front rack, capable of carrying up to 80lbs, is removable and caters for both a Topo Designsbackpack and a Rivendell basket for trips to the Grower’s Market. Nicholas designed the frame around Honjo fenders and Paul Components brake calipers, resulting in a tight and responsive ride. Philadelphia’s Revolution Cycle Jewelry created a custom head badge, while Future Cities Lab, experimental designers and researchers, produced the laser–etched Eastern Walnut signage panel."
Designed for Shape with Nick Riddle
Headphone That Launched a Brand
Industrial design
Role - contract industrial designer at Astro Studios
Sol Republic is a fresh new face at the crowded headphone party. With a potent arsenal of in-ear and on-ear headphones, Sol Republic is paving its path to sonic dominance by offering excellent looking, feeling and sounding headsets. To cut through the noisy traffic of in-ear and on-ear headsets that drown the market today, Sol required our designers to start from scratch and envisioned a brand-new way to wear music. Sol Republic headphones were designed with swappable "FlexTech" headbands, cables and upgradeable "sound engines" to enable a wide range of personal audio fashion effects and configurations that complement the many soundtracks of life.
Designed at ASTRO Studios
IDEA - Excellence Awards
GenKit Cannabis Sexing System
Packaging, strategy, product development
Role - industrial design, packaging design, product development.
Steep Hill is the world leader in Cannabis research and testing, offering services and products that bring scientific accuracy to a modern Cannabis industry. We helped Steep Hill design system for anonymous in-field sample collection and testing, which helps growers increase yield and significantly reduce the time and labor required to determine the sex of their cannabis plants.
Designed at ASTRO Studios
