Sonos

ONE ONE

Industrial Design Lead
Product Photography
Product Renders

Release 2017

The Sonos One was the first Sonos smart speaker with Alexa and Google assistant integration and offers a custom designed mic array that supports and improves on the existing hot word detection. It is a great example of a high performing team challenging the known schedule, design process and pushing the limits to deliver a product update within a year – a Sonos first!

Approach

Due to the given cost and time constraints (of one year to market) the broad design concept exploration had to be narrowed down fast and expectations had to be set early on in the program. Tradeoffs based on the feasibility and importance of features were made so that the team was able to focus on execution as soon as possible.

Execution

To enable the preferred design intent the metal grille gets stamped in 12 steps and then welded, polished and painted to the continuous shape of the speaker. To achieve the uniform CMF special care had to be taken to match the white of the metal grille with the plastic top and bottom caps. As a result we have removed any unnessesary visual noise that distracts from the object.

Close collaboration with the UX team ensured that the new voice assistant user experience worked flawlessly, even when a query was started with voice, continued in the app and then stopped with the controls on the speaker.

Details

Due to the given cost and time constraints the broad design concept exploration had to be narrowed down and expectations had to be set early on in the program. Tradeoffs based on the feasibility and importance of features were made so that the team was able to focus on execution as fast as possible.

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