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 4 of 4
Elements AR (EdTech)
Teaching kids to build AR experiences with block-based code.
Elements AR was a different kind of project, not a sprint, but a full product built from scratch. I led a team of product designers and engineers building an iPad application that taught students how to design and build their own Augmented Reality experiences, using Scratch (MIT Media Lab's block-based coding environment) as the logic layer.
The idea was genuinely exciting: give students the tools to be creators of AR, not just consumers of it. Design it. Code the logic. See it come to life in the physical world through the iPad camera.
Building an EdTech product for students means designing for a very different kind of user than enterprise software. Delight matters. Clarity matters. The feedback loop between action and result needs to be immediate and satisfying. Those constraints make you a better designer.
Project video
The product
An iPad app where students design AR scenes, attach Scratch-based logic to AR objects, and experience their creations in the real world through the camera. Design creation, code logic, AR preview, all in one coherent experience designed for the classroom.
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.