From Gay Condoms to Death Apps, Stanford Product Design Students are Keeping it Real
A roundup of senior capstone product design projects from the Stanford d.school
Once a year the seniors of Stanford’s product design program put their final projects on display at the d.school and undergo the scrutinizing judgement of savvy design professionals. VP’s from fortune 100's, founders of household brands, and sassy hustlers like myself take time to assess the design approach, process, development and go-to-market strategy of the products they’ve created. We look at their user testing, observe their iteration and assess their final product with an emphasis on preparing them for the next steps outside the Stanford nest. I formally judged 5 projects this year that I think you’ll get a kick out of.
Stanford University is the academic epicenter of the Silicon Valley. Often the top pick for both the offspring of the rich and famous, as well as the Venture Capital wells a stones throw away on Sand Hill Road, Stanford’s culture is shocking the opposite of the demographic buzzing just outside its gates. It’s incredibly humble, down-to-earth, genuinely-curious-about-learning community of minds and makers is beautiful. A utopia for mental expansion, I’m always eager to take part in d.school activities, and even more honored to “judge” their final projects. I say judge playfully because while us futurists like to think we know the future of the product world, we are often surprised. A few years back it was Evan Spiegel presenting his senior project at one of these same tables. I told the young founder “ghosterly” was a bad idea. He’s done a few things since then to prove me wrong.
Projects are ranked on a 1–5 scale, with 5 being brilliant. There were 26 projects created by this year’s class and I picked five to feature here. I would have loved to include a sixth project, SomaSole, but restrained from including my biased assessment of their project (I’m one of their advisors, more on them soon).
STAG Condoms: Best Brand; Hottest Booth Babes
Product Score: 2
Pitch Score: 5
There are two ways to win in the product design world: 1) Design something the world has a need for that’s never been done before 2) Repackage a product that falls into category 1, but re-skin it to appeal to a tight niche community market. Stag falls into category two, slipping their clever gay friendly branding over extra-lubricated white-label rubbers. Originally looking to build a condom delivery service for everyone, the Stag team realized homosexual men were severely under-marketed to in the general condom market, catalyzing a pivot to a more focused niche approach. At a competition-comparable prices of a buck a fuck, they might be on to something.
Stag customers can order condoms in volumes of 3, 6, 12, and 18 and schedule automatically deliveries as frequently as they’d like whether that be weekly, monthly or annually. Stag’s added lubricant is a nice consideration for gentleman on gentleman play, but I wouldn’t exactly call it an innovation. Stag’s best bet is to be the Redbull of the gay condom market. Their branding was “best in class;” now they’ve just got to market the fuck out of it.
Ohmkara Tools: Best “Maker” Tool; Mister Congeniality Award
Product Score: 3
Pitch Score: 2
I have a soft spot for Electrical Engineers. They’re the unsung heros of the physical product world, with their copper wire and firmware integrating form and function behind the scenes. Sean and Lucas fit the bill perfectly. After observing their peers in the EE lab struggling to debug messy circuits, they began prototyping a solution for laying clean jumper wires on the bread board. Ohmkara is just that, a multi-tool for the electronically inclined.
The Ohmkara team prototyped many versions of their product, using 3D Printing to test their initial design, and then eventually moving to laser cutting and injection molding. Then they took their final design to the discerning shoppers of Kickstarter. They soon learned that while there was a lot of community enthusiasm for what they were doing, their first job out of Stanford wasn’t going to be bread board accessories. Makers themselves, they shut down their campaign and made all their design files open-source. This was such an awesome and honest pivot to hear. They’ll go on with their lives, and creatives around the world will benefit from the work they put into this project for years to come.
NIMBUS Light: Lifesaver Award; Design Constraint Champions
Product Score: 4
Pitch Score: 4
Imagine for a moment you’re flying a Blackhawk helicopter. You’re speeding through the pitch black of night over enemy territory. Encased in the clouds, you need to consult your map and check your coordinates, but can’t without turning on a light. Your finger light requires you to take your hands off the controls, but any other light is too bright and could reveal your location. What do you do?
If Rachel Olney and Max Hershfield have anything to do with it, you won’t have to worry about this dilemma ever again. You’ll be wearing NIMBUS light instead. NIMBUS, currently raising money on Indiegogo, is a glove lighting solution that makes turning on, using, and turning off your light a one-handed task. Rachel’s husband is a Blackhawk pilot, so they’ve had the opportunity to do special research on military requirements and pilot needs for cabin illumination. NIMBUS LEDs are a special wavelength of light not detectable in night vision goggles, making this the safest light for helicopter pilots, ever. I hope these two get funding and sign a fat deal with the military. Innovation that saves lives always gets a gold star in my book.
Rippl: Best in Show; Most Emotional Pitch
Product Score: 3
Pitch Score: 5
Rippl was the #1 company I was looking forward to talking with today and they didn’t disappoint. Death is an incredibly challenging time for people, and product innovation in the space is as morbid as the subject matter. I’ve experienced my fair share of tragedy and have always been disappointed how clumsy it is to come together over multiple social platforms in our efforts to grieve. Rippl looks to solve that, making memory preservation a beautiful, well designed and organized process.
Rippl isn’t just a web platform, and that’s on purpose. They actually abandoned their first web based product initially, because “death is physical.” How’s that for a little real talk? They were inclusive in their design approach, talking not only to friends and family who’d lost loved ones and had to deal with it digitally recently, but also to funeral homes and tombstone makers to learn more about how we preserve and immortalize. After they realized the importance of “legacy” to a grieving family, they came up with the other part of Rippl, which is essentially a community time capsule that can be opened anytime. Mourners send in stories or physical momentos of community members and anyone else in the community can share in those memories.
These guys are my favorite of the day. Not only are they tackling the most emotionally complex challenge of the class, they approached the project with empathy, desire to learn and a passion to do design something truly better. They have great reason for doing what they’re doing, and if they can synergize their IRL efforts with their web platform, could prevail as the communal mourning service of the future. Which ironically makes me very happy to see.
Big Box of Socks: Keep it Simple Winner; The “Steve” Award
Product Score: 2
Pitch Score: 3
There’s no mystery here. It’s literally a box of sox, that shows up full of as many pairs as you’d like, as frequently as you’d like tall men’s black business socks to be delivered. The subscription model isn’t new and neither are black socks, but there’s a reason I think this has hope in the market.
Steve Jobs would have purchased this. At least if he liked the socks. Highly successful people are often incredibly efficient, not wanting to waste time sorting, matching and folding socks. Big Box of Socks eliminates that- all your socks are the same and can be worn with any of your other socks (is this what we call disrupting the “pair of sock space?”) Socks can be delivered as frequently as you’d like in a quantity ranging from 3–18 pairs, so if you’d prefer never to wash another sock again, you could (though it’ll cost you). If the founder can find a way to make the boxes the socks come in modular and stackable, there is dollar-shave-club-esk potential. Not to mention, socks in a box? Dr. Seuss would have had a field day.
Was a unicorn on display today? Only time will tell.
Which was your favorite?
Special thanks to Bill Burnett and the Stanford d.school for hosting us all today.
