2022 Year in Review
Reflections on new challenges and milestones
While the metaverse and crypto technologies were key topics in the first half of the year, the tide turned almost overnight as markets shifted and the conversation evolved to generative computing. argo’s work was equally expansive, covering industries from robotics to social impact to AI-enabled everything. A quick look back before moving forward…
Pepper
There is perhaps nothing better than seeing a long-time partner achieve marked success in their industry. We’ve worked with smart home platform Pepper for almost 10 years and, in 2022, reimagined their OS to support widespread adoption. The new user experience, including device controls, automations, and an updated mosaic dashboard, works with any number of devices, allowing Pepper to move into new markets. This became reality in December, when the company announced it had combined with Comcast’s InsurTech business unit, Notion, to create a leading IoT and smart home platform.
Grassroots Grocery
Sometimes innovation born of necessity produces a solution that sticks around. Such was the case with Grassroots Grocery, a Bronx nonprofit that sprang to life during the pandemic to serve food deserts in the New York City area. When it became clear that growth was on the horizon, the organization partnered with argo to help it expand its footprint. A scalable business strategy that multiplies community impact has taken it from a single community fridge to 30 hyper-local community drop-off points.
Kyndryl
The world’s largest IT infrastructure provider, Kyndryl came to argo to help expand its platform into a comprehensive ecosystem of services. The resulting cloud-based open integration platform streamlines how enterprises engage with, consume, and manage their IT stack. The solution lets CIOs deploy and manage all of their IT services, view performance issues before they escalate, and implement new solutions at the ready.
Builder.ai
Our work with Builder.ai is ushering the company through several stages of strategy, planning, and execution toward enterprise-level scaling of dynamic, AI-generated apps in the moment. argo’s uniquely informed experience in AI tooling makes us the ideal partner for developing groundbreaking software experiences for generative app development.
Apptronik
We spent months huddled with Austin-based Apptronik designing a vision for the brand, form, and controls of Apollo, a NASA-backed humanoid robot (what you see above is a very early prototype). Our shared goal is to create a general-purpose robot capable of working alongside humans in critical industries, ranging from logistics, retail, hospitality, aerospace and beyond. Keep your eyes peeled for its commercial launch sometime this year.
Securonix
While robots are undoubtedly cool, cybersecurity is vital to keeping our digital lives running. And when its design is out of step with the wants and needs of the market, that can have dire results for businesses and consumers alike. For Securonix, we embraced complexity to design a learnable, user-centered cybersecurity tool. The new design offers robust workflow features and a consistent user experience to improve usability, drive adoption, and deliver trustworthy decision support.
Mixed Reality X
In a year in which XR headsets dropped as often as Taylor Swift tracks, we wanted to raise the bar. Building on knowledge from our years-long partnership with Magic Leap, the Mixed Reality X concept imagines the headset as a more heads-up and present participant to our everyday lives. Through ergonomics, industrial design, and new organizing principles, argo’s design amplifies our physical environment, frees us from the restraints of immersive computing, and delivers on the technology’s full potential.
Wink
Our Think by Making ethos came to life with a reimagined voice assistant. A voice assistant that reacts to you and its environment, Wink leverages natural human attributes to create a richer interaction experience with voice technology. When you look at Wink, it responds by looking at you. When you address Wink, it responds, tracks your gaze, and shows that it is listening. Fast Company said that it ‘captures what Google, Apple, and Amazon forgot.’
We welcome 2023 with optimism and excitement for the products we design and the ways in which we design them.
