Drown'eyes
The tracking technology already existed. The product around it did not.
During a Startup Weekend at École Polytechnique, our three-person team explored how an autonomous drone could follow a user and capture photos or video without a camera operator. My role was to translate the engineers’ tracking concept into a coherent physical architecture, visual identity and product story under the constraints of a single weekend.
My contribution
Industrial design · Product architecture · 3D modelling · Visualisation
The team
2 engineers 1 industrial designer
Year
2015
Start with the technology, not a blank brief
One engineer entered the weekend with an existing user-tracking concept. The design challenge was therefore not to invent autonomy from scratch, but to understand the hardware requirements and decide what kind of product could make that capability useful and legible.
Turn internal constraints into an external form
I defined the drone’s overall architecture around the tracking components and flight hardware. The form needed to protect the technology, communicate direction and movement, and remain visually simple enough to read as one coherent product rather than an assembly of parts.
Design for the pitch as well as the object
With very limited time, a production-ready prototype was unrealistic. I prioritised the decisions that made the idea credible: a resolved silhouette, clear integration of the technical elements and 3D renderings that allowed the jury to understand the experience immediately.
Outcome
The weekend produced a coherent autonomous-camera-drone concept and a visual pitch that gave the tracking technology a tangible product form.
Drown’eyes was not a production-ready aircraft, and the project does not claim commercial impact. Its value lies in the speed and quality of the translation: an engineering capability became an understandable user proposition, physical architecture and design direction within a highly compressed timeframe.
It is an early example of a way of working that still defines my practice, collaborating closely with engineers and using industrial design to make emerging technology understandable, desirable and concrete.