Office for Design was tasked with the industrial design for DBX, the drone industry’s first consumer-facing autonomous drone delivery hub.
The prototype was launched in 2024.
From DroneUp:
DroneUp’s industry-defining ground infrastructure, DBX, enables autonomous pickup of packages from retailers, QSR, and other origination points. DBX provides climate-controlled package management and storage with a footprint smaller than a parking space.
DBX will also be deployed as a delivery destination in urban areas, unlocking drone delivery in hard-to-deliver areas like apartments and multi-dwelling communities. As a secure locker, DBX addresses the widespread issue of “porch piracy,” keeping packages safe and secure.
Additionally, DBX provides consumers a seamless way to return their orders in minutes, enabling convenient reverse logistics.
Industrial Design
Packaging Design
Office for Design created the primary and secondary packaging for Malin+Goetz' first home fragrance.
Industrial Design, Mechanical Design
Chameleons is a modular hardware platform designed to demonstrate updatable interactive experiences created by Google's Experience Studio.
Experience Studio conceives, builds, and maintains a network of Experience Centers around the world to give Google customers a glimpse 'under the hood' at the magic, technology, and future Google is building.
Office for Design partnered with the Experience Studio to design a kiosk and podium for hosting interactive experiences on a rotating basis, both within and outside of Experience Centers. The goal was to create hardware that accommodates the existing library of content as well as new experiences that are being created continuously. Chameleons' design language fits within the ecosystem of Google Hardware consumer products: human, approachable, discreet.
The kiosk is an all-in-one unit which houses a computer, an audio system, camera, and touchscreen. It is a flexible, self-sufficient platform for interactive experiences. The podium is a smaller companion to settings where a computer, audio system, camera, and screen are already present. It provides an ergonomic perch for the physical interfaces (keyboard, tablet, joystick, etc) that control the experiences.
Industrial Design, Packaging Design
“Design has always been a core part of our brand, driving everything from the distinctive look of our packaging to the precise merchandising in each of our architecturally unique stores. As a result, when it came to developing something as special as the cannabis supercandle – a statement-making piece that comes in a specially designed and equally impressive box – we knew we needed to work with an exceptional designer to get the job done. Enter Jonas Damon, industrial designer and longtime friend of our founder Andrew. With 25 years of experience working with prestigious names such as vitra (where he and Andrew first met), Tom Dixon, Starbucks and Frog Design, Jonas had the breadth and the ingenuity to create the product we envisioned. For a glimpse into his creative process, here we present the origin story of cannabis supercandle, as told by Jonas Damon himself”.
Full interview at: The making of a super candle
Industrial Design, Systems Design
Office for Design was asked to design the order-pickup lockers (“cubbies”), Kernel’s primary physical interaction with customers. Kernel is a new plant-based restaurant concept created by Chipotle founder Steve Ells. Kernel utilizes automation to offer the highest quality fast-casual food for it’s customers and improve operational economics for the business.
Cubbies, a BOPIS system, utilize a commercially available shelving structure with integrated custom, smartphone-operable lockers. For Kernel’s first location in downtown Manhattan, the cubby structure is arranged in a J-shape and functions as a partition between the restaurant’s front end and it’s highly automated cooking cell rear. Cubbies are designed to provide “peek-a-boo” visibility of both the cooking cell and each customer’s order. They signal readiness with custom lighting and are unlocked through customer’s own devices.
Kernel is expanding with over a dozen new locations in New York City in the next two years.
Industrial Design, Systems Design
Highline is an adaptable, innovative lighting system that brings the functionality and precision of a linear track fixture together with the character and individuality of decorative pendants. The beam’s concealed track allows for the attachment of a cone pendant, a dual-axis swivel spotlight, and a warm felt shade pendant all with playful yet technically refined hooks. In addition, a high power linear uplight can be concealed completely within the beam’s track.
Animation: Hampus Lideborg
Industrial Design
Industrial Design, Systems Design
Mini Market upgrades the workplace experience basics by reinventing the pantry and supply cabinets, redistributing their utility to where they are most appreciated - in the reception, meeting rooms, team rooms, wash rooms, and other areas of productivity.
The modular system comprises wood trays, containers, lighting fixtures, and digital displays, all corralled on a single landing pad with concealed cable management.
Industrial Design, Customer Experience Design, Design Strategy
2020 Fast Company Innovation By Design honoree
This Whimsical Kiosk Turns Coffee Service Into a Magic Show
By Mark Wilson
The automated coffee machine continues to be a sad, vestigial organ of hospital cafeteria culture. So when Jonas Damon, former VP of concepts studio at Starbucks and current chief design officer at the robotic coffee startup Truebird, was figuring out how to package an automated coffee kiosk of the future, he recognized that it had to break old conventions and find its own identity. “We sit somewhere on the spectrum from vending machine to coffee shop,” says Damon. “We obviously want to be closer to a coffee shop. And part of being a coffee shop is it’s architectural in nature.”
Damon’s team chose to hide away Truebird’s mechanical features, such as automated milk dispensers, to create a machine accented to evoke an inviting café (wood panels) or kitchen (Corian counters), with liberal amounts of glass camouflaging the unit into its surroundings. With dimensions similar to an oversize hutch, Truebird glows with pools of light, and the bright orange espresso machine—the kiosk’s single pop of color—can’t be missed from across the room. “That’s the long-distance cue that you can get great espresso there,” says Damon.
In this era of social distancing, the robotic coffee maker fulfills every order with a little high-tech magic show, using magnets to glide cups across the counter from the espresso machine to your pickup slot. The effect makes for a whimsical celebration of automation. “You can’t see any mechanics,” says Damon, “just a cup floating across a white surface.”
New Stand provides workplace amenities through a tiered system of purpose built equipment and interior structures, ranging from automated retail vending machines to attended kiosks to full retail environments.
Jonas Damon was asked to provide industrial design services across the system, from helping with refinement of the existing infrastructure to concepting, designing, and developing new components in the systems catalog.
Newlab brings tech entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists and other like-minded visionaries and leaders under a single majestic roof in Brooklyn's Navy Yard to collaborate and build a future that is optimistic and real. The space is home to companies and ventures that are reinventing robotics to spacecraft, manufacturing to transportation, cities to agriculture.
Newlab asked Jonas Damon to design a modular exhibition system to showcase the variety of artifacts created at Newlab. Spaceframe is a series of open rectangular prisms that form exhibition pedestals. Each pedestal can be placed on any one of its different sides, and with a display surface, the pedestal becomes a versatile structure of 3 different possible proportions. Multiple pedestals are grouped and tied together with connectors to create display islands of varying topography and storytelling potential.
Assembly OSM delivers architecturally distinctive high-rise buildings through a technologically advanced process of digital design, manufacturing, assembly, and on-site installation.
Jonas Damon’s contribution focused on design & development of the interior wall and ceiling finish panel system for Alpha, Assembly’s 1-bedroom prototype.
Assembly OSM has engineered an innovative, integrated system of manufactured components and sub-assemblies: structural steel chassis; unitized facades; wall, floor, and ceiling cassettes; mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and environmental systems; kitchen, bathroom, and casework pods; building cores with elevators and stairs. Our structural system is parameterized, meaning that individual modules can take a wide range of different dimensions and shapes, enabling many different unit sizes and layouts within buildings that are unique and distinctive, fitting lots of any size.
Newlab Detroit is part of Ford's Michigan Central mobility innovation district, located in the historic Corktown neighborhood. Albert Kahn's long-abandoned Book Depository building underwent an extensive renovation to bring Newlab's tech entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists and other like-minded visionaries and leaders together to form mobility focused ventures and companies.
The original Spaceframe modular exhibition system was revisited and redesigned to accommodate exhibits as large and heavy as cars. Each pedestal can be placed on any one of its different sides, and with a display surface, the pedestal becomes a versatile structure of 3 different possible proportions. Multiple pedestals are grouped and tied together with connectors to create display islands of varying topography and storytelling potential.
The New York Times just will not rest until you buy this
For almost a decade now, the paper of record has been pushing the exact same clock. Make it stop!
By JUSTIN SLAUGHTER
The New York Times will not rest until you embrace major-league soccer, Kim Gordon's memoir, a bipartisan grand compromise on entitlements and Portland's food trucks. Also, give in and buy this alarm clock, already.
Areaware's "Numbers LED alarm clock," designed by Jonas Damon, has caused quite a stir at the paper of record over the last decade. It is a simple string of four black cubes with a red L.E.D. display of a single number per cube. The cubes can be detached from the strings and rearranged, in case you want to confuse friends and family and cause them to be late for important meetings.
Like, perhaps, editorial meetings at the New York Times where clock coverage gets planned, and people might ask the question, "Hey, haven't we pushed this same f**king clock on our readers a million times?"
Almost, yes!
On Thursday, The Times published the last edition of the stand-alone Home section, but not before giving a final shout-out to the wacky cube clock. "Daylight saving time begins at 2 a.m. on Sunday," the story noted, "and in the spirit of springing forward, the interior designer Antonino Buzzetta, 30, went looking for stylish bedside clocks." (Right! He was going shopping for clocks already, and not simply because the New York Times asked him to be part of a puffy product feature.)
One of the clocks Buzzetta selected: Areaware's L.E.D. cubes. It looked so familiar that we visited Lexis.
Turns out the alarm clock first showed up in October 2006 as the Open Edition clock which gives the “the illusion that one might actually have power over time:” Damon told the paper that "You can play around with the order of the digits, and then time's completely out the window."
Almost exactly a year later (your stopped clock joke here), the Times' Home report posed this question: How do I choose a wall clock? Answer! "A more whimsical choice ... is the Open Edition clock ($85; mossonline.com), four movable, free-standing blocks that display the proper time when lined up correctly. Although it is not a wall clock, it is a great addition to a shelf."
The Times fluffed the clock again in November 2010, as part of a T magazine feature about up and coming designers, including Damon, by Monica Khemsurov. "Damon’s repertory of charmingly approachable products continues to swell," observed the Times, noting "an L.E.D. alarm clock composed of four rearrangeable black cubes, each displaying a single red digit, that was inspired by 1980s supercomputers."
Barely six months later, the clock and its designer showed up again: “Alarm Clocks Shopping with Jonas Damon” by Tim McKeough. That story -- not pegged to springing forward or falling back, as far as we can tell -- takes us on a journey from Soho to the Upper East Side with Damon in search of, wait for it, the perfect alarm clock.
It notes that: "In 1999, he designed (Damon) first one for Habitat, stripping down a standard digital alarm clock to its basic electronic components and exposing them in a transparent red box. A few years later, for Umbra, he created Digi, which displays hours and minutes in separate frames. In 2006, he split the digits into four stand-alone boxes, with the Numbers clock for Areaware."
We'll let someone else do the hard-hitting media criticism of searching Lexis to see how the Times covered Damon' breakthroughs in clock deconstruction before 2006. Or of asking, does this designer have any other clocks the NYT might recommend? He does! They have!
In Thursday's latest rave, interior designer Antonino Buzzetta opines that “a clock ‘should be more of an objet -- something chic, maybe vintage.’”
It’s an interesting tactic. Spend a decade reviewing a clock enough to make it chic, then praise the same clock a few years later as vintage. With genius like that, the Home section will stay in print forever. Oh, wait...
JUSTIN SLAUGHTER
Courtesy Salon.com
Creative Director, frog
Designed for 100% digital inclusion, Verizon Digital Kiosk (formerly LQD Palo) is a unified technology hub where anyone can engage with the community, the internet and local services at any time.
Placemaking: VDK connects people to essential information, resources and safety by offering free wifi, information on nearby attractions, restaurants, retail and events, volunteering opportunities and community groups, public service announcements, maps and way finding, emergency alerts, meeting points and taxi beacons.
Progressive: VDK's microphone and sensors promote touch-free operation. Energy-efficient solar panels and other failsafe technologies keep Palo functioning through extreme conditions, ensuring continuity in times of crisis. Palo's cutting-edge software is designed to evolve with the changing needs of the city and its citizens.
Playful: VDK is engaging and accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds. It's designed to greet users like a human being, just like a dialogue with a friendly neighbor. Whether you're a local, a tourist, a runner, or a senior, Palo can customize results for you. You can even take Palo with you using a smartphone companion app.
Palo / VDK Timeline:
2013 – A multi-disciplinary team in frog’s NY studio responds to the Mayor’s Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge to imagine a new public utility for the payphone vendor agreements expiring in 2014. frog’s submits “Beacon,” which is selected as one of 6 finalists, also winning the best visual and user experience design award.
2014 – frog receives the IDSA IDEA Silver Award for the Beacon design. LQD, a wireless startup, partners with frog to bring the concept to market and develop an integrated network of 21st-century community-based tech hubs. Beacon is renamed Palo.
2015 – In only 18 weeks, LQD and frog built the business strategy and brand vision, refined the design, and developed the hardware. Palo was unveiled at the Intelligent Community Forum Summit in Toronto.
2016 – LQD is acquired by Verizon, with the intent to integrate Palo into their ‘smart cities’ strategy. Palo is renamed ‘Verizon Digital Kiosk’.
2017 – the Digital Kiosk is part of the Verizon installations for Super Bowl 2017.
2018– The first Digital Kiosks are installed in New Rochelle, NY
2019 – Digital Kiosks launch in cities across the US, including Seattle and Sacramento.
The Evolution of a Smart City Hub
Current work in progress for Truebird Technologies. Launching Q4 2024.
