Highlights from 2021

The year that was

As we look in anticipation for all that 2022 may hold, it is also nice to look back at all that was achieved in the year that passed.

Pebble has been in market for less than a year now and yet already, so many exciting things have taken place. This short piece is intended at sharing the stories of some of those.

Pebble Design — a recap

Pebble Design has been set up with three overlapping arms.

The Studio — where we support teams who want to explore, test and build exciting new products & services, or innovate upon existing ones.

The Incubator — where we experiment with with building our own products, putting our own approach to a test.

The River — where we develop and publish frameworks and methods on the topic of design-led innovation.

Highlights from the year that was

The Studio- Meta & PHORIA

There has been a number of exciting projects this past year, but certainly the most exciting of them all, has been our collaboration with PHORIA (a world-leading extended reality studio based in Melbourne) and Meta (The Meta), specifically — Meta Reality Labs, the team behind all the AR/VR magic we have been hearing about as of late.

We can’t specify the details, as none of it is yet public, but long story short, we worked on an exciting little corner of the ever-expanding Metaverse.

PHORIA & Pebble were brought in to work on something cool that Meta has been cooking behind the scenes. PHORIA— bringing their world-leading extended-reality expertise; Pebble — bringing our design-led innovation approach and method; Meta Reality Labs — bringing their world-leading projects and experiments — a fertile ground for all of us to collaborate within.

Together, we tried to push the boundaries of, and innovate upon, what was done to date, inching this corner of the Metaverse ever closer to being shared with the wider public, one day soon.

This project was a heap of fun and resulted in some of the most exciting user research and rapid prototyping we have engaged in, to date. Hell — we are now true believers in the ever-expanding potential of metaverse, and to put it lightly — it is well and truly here.

We can’t share much more, but what we can do is point you in the direction of some great from our collaborators .

PHORIA truly are masters of their craft, to find out more about their mind-bending work check out Phoria.com.au.

Meta Reality Labs are building the magical future of what the internet could do, check them out at about.facebook.com/realitylabs/.

The Incubator- Accio

Accio is an internal experiment turned product and now in the midst of turning into an exciting little venture.

In a nutshell — Accio are lost & found stickers that help item-finders, find, owners.

Think Tile or AirTags, but — smaller, cheaper and just as, if not more, effective.

They cost a fraction of the cost, they are so thin they are pretty much 2-D, and unlike its competitors that require a high-tech mesh network to help you locate your things, Accio is a low-tech solution that works anywhere, requiring nothing but — the kindness of strangers.

It all started as an experiment in testing product design and user research methods. We took a simple problem (losing things), put together a simple solution around it, broke it down to its core assumptions and started testing.

The intention was to have fun, learn and use it as a way to improve our research methods. Yet, one thing led to another and what was started as an experiment, grew a life and became its own little product.

Accio is now at a Pilot stage, with an effective MVP in the market, a few hundred customers, and a lost & found rate of ~70%.

It is still heaps rough around the edges, but that’s kind of the point —build & test quickly and cheaply, polish and perfect later.

To find out more and join our little lost and found experiment go to Accio.co.

The River- Our Cornerstone

For years now, even before Pebble came to be, we have been working on documenting our design-led innovation process and approach — pages upon pages of processes, principles, templates, tips & tricks of the trade.

Yet, it eventually dawned on us that releasing it all at once was too big of a task, and so we decided to change tact.

Throughout 2022, we will be making a series of design-drops — publishing bits and pieces of our approach, one pebble at a time.

First on the list is our Cornerstone — the centre-piece of our design process, around which stands everything else we do.

While no framework is ‘The’ right approach, and certainly not this one, the Cornerstone is ‘Our’ approach, and we think many of you might find it quite useful, if not just interesting to explore.

It’s almost there, maybe a few weeks away, and once ready, we will put it out there for everyone to give it a whirl.

Sign up here to stay in the know about when we make the drop.

And that’s a wrap

2021 was fertile ground for a lot of exciting things.

Now, let 2022 roll in and see what it, has to offer.