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Design Research & Systems
Ethnography before electronics. The data layer after.
- hours of field observation before design
- tick-to-screen latency
- minutes · a workflow, before and after
We spent fifty hours behind a bar before designing a pour sensor. Watching the work set the spec: how bottles are racked, what gets dropped, what goes through the glasswasher that was never supposed to. Devices designed from the field get used. Devices designed from a conference room get shelved.
The research runs through to the software that makes the hardware worth owning: real-time pipelines, dashboards, alerting, on-premise AI where the data cannot leave the building. A proprietary trading desk we rebuilt inside a spreadsheet holds tick-to-screen latency under 100 ms and cut the morning workflow from 35 minutes to 5.
Method
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Observe
Hours in the field before hours at the bench. The workflow as it is, with its workarounds, is the true requirements document.
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Map
Journeys, failure points, and teardowns of the tools people already trust. What survives contact gets kept.
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Spec the pair
The device and its data contract are designed together, so the sensor never ships an orphan.
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Ship the system
Pipeline, dashboard, and alerts delivered with the hardware as one artifact. A sensor without its data layer is a paperweight.
Deliverables
- Field studies & usability testing
- Journey maps & competitive teardowns
- Device + data-contract specifications
- Real-time pipelines & dashboards
- On-premise AI integration
- Alerting & reporting layers
Bench
- Field study & shadowing kits the bar, the floor, the desk
- Usability protocols tested on the people who will use it
- Real-time dashboards WebSocket-fed, sub-second
- On-premise AI when the data cannot leave the building