Homes are becoming steadily more connected; smart light bulbs, smart speakers, digital home assistants, smart thermostats and home security cameras, to name a few; are now commonplace within the modern home. All this connectivity, unfortunately, is making the home a target for cybercrime. Ideally, homes now require business-grade network protection to prevent hackers from listening to your private conversations, tracking your movements and stealing your passwords. However, such advanced protection usually comes hand-in-hand with much technical jargon, overly complicated set-ups and the requirement of in-depth maintenance processes. Hedgehog responds to this by providing business-like protection but with a plug-and-play set-up. Hedgehog is your digital guardian. It uses Zobi Home Intelligence to detect and prevent cyber-crime across your entire home network. It’s small, cute—but prickly in the face of attacks, hence its name.
It was important to us that the name and purpose of the object inspired the design language. Due to this, Hedgehog is small, cute and friendly. However, it also has sharp defensive edges, a subtle reference to the spikes of a Hedgehog, which are used to defend against attacks. Functionally, these spikes provide ventilation and a hidden aperture for Hedgehog’s lighting. We felt that the Hedgehog needed to be visible, but at the same time; blend into the home environment. Due to this, we were inspired by homeware design trends; to help us create a decorative feeling object and to prevent Hedgehog from feeling like a piece of consumer electronics. This approach has, in turn, emphasised the cute and friendly aesthetic, allowing it to blend into virtually any home, no matter the decor.
Services:
Ethnographic Research
Design Strategy
Industrial Design
Product Design
Design for Manufacture (DFM)
Packaging Design
Visualisation
Photography
Art Direction
Hoglet is the name for a baby hedgehog. Hoglet is a Wifi range booster that expands Zobi’s product line. It pulls aesthetic queues from its ‘parent’ Hedgehog to create a coherent design language that distinguishes the Zobi family of products.
