Case study · PTC Innovation
Design Innovation
AR and IoT at the edge of what was possible.
Four projects. One through-line.
Every project here sits at the same intersection: complex physical operations, the people who run them, and technology that could make their work less hard. The form factor changed (factory floor, elevator shaft, HoloLens, iPad), but the design challenge was always the same: make something genuinely new feel immediately useful.
Project 1 of 4
BMW Innovation Labs
Seeing the invisible: IoT and AR for second-life EV batteries.
BMW came to the sprint with a specific and fascinating problem. EV batteries that can no longer power vehicles still have significant energy capacity, enough to be repurposed as large-scale stationary battery banks for energy storage. But the service and frontline workers managing these installations had no good way to understand the status, health, and operational state of what they were looking at.
The sprint focused on using IoT sensor data combined with Augmented Reality to give workers an immediate visual layer of information overlaid on the physical battery banks, making the invisible visible. By Friday we had a working prototype that let a worker point a device at a battery installation and see real-time status, alerts, and operational context anchored to the physical hardware.
Project video
The problem
Large EV battery banks are complex systems. Individual cells, thermal management, charge states, fault conditions: none of it is visible from the outside. Workers needed to understand system health at a glance without navigating a dashboard on a separate screen while standing in front of the hardware.
The prototype
An AR overlay anchored to physical battery installations, surfacing real-time IoT data (cell status, temperature, charge levels, alerts) directly in the worker's field of view. Designed to work in a physically demanding environment: gloves, poor lighting, time pressure.
What sprint work teaches you that nothing else does.
These projects shaped how I think about design process in ways that are hard to replicate in a normal product cycle. A week is an incredibly clarifying constraint. You cannot over-research, over-design, or over-polish. You have to make decisions with incomplete information and commit to them. That muscle, confident decision-making under real constraints, is one of the most valuable things a designer can develop.
The onsite work at Otis also reinforced something I had learned in factory visits for DPM: you cannot design well for a physical environment you have never been in. Reading about elevator installation is not the same as standing on a construction site watching it happen. Context is not optional.
And Elements AR reminded me that designing for delight is a skill, not a given. Enterprise work trains you to prioritize clarity and efficiency. EdTech work trains you to make something that makes someone smile. Both matter. The best products do both.