Project Overview

The SwatchMate Cube™ let’s you capture the color of anything. Record color inspiration on your smartphone or computer.

Organisation

Palette - SwatchMate

Team

Djordje Dikic - Design Director
James Sloss - Industrial Design
Rocky Liang - Technical Director
Paul Peng - Software Director

Project Brief

We humans. Always looking to be inspired. Yet as we march into the digital future, we’ve become separated from our greatest source of inspiration: the natural world.

So we started thinking, what if we created a new way of interacting with our surroundings. Could a product bring us closer to the things that inspire us?

The Cube reveals the hidden moments of inspiration that happen all around us. Built for the creative inside all of us, the Cube let’s you capture the color of anything.

At SwatchMate, we believe creativity is precious, and that with the right tools, anyone can be an artist. With the Cube, the world of color becomes your palette.

Project Innovation/Need

As creatives, we saw the natural world for its brimming colors, but we had no way of interacting with them: using swatch books to match color was inaccurate and wasted time.

To solve this, we invented the Cube to allow users to instantly scan any surface and digitally capture its color.

Being inspired by a beautiful color is spontaneous and emotional, so we focused on radically simplifying the user experience to the essentials: see color, capture color. To use the Cube, you just place it on an inspiring color to record its values.

When paired wirelessly to a smartphone, captured colors can be matched to paint brands, and shared with friends. When connected to a computer, the Cube becomes a bridge between the natural and digital worlds, importing the captured color directly into Photoshop and other design software.

We worked hard to create a reference tool that enables people to throw out their crusty old swatch books. More than a tool, we also created a device that makes the colorful world around us more interactive and fun.

Design Challenge

Creating products is hard. This often means new products are focused on technology – forgetting to express why the product exists in the first place.

The Cube is an extension device. It extends a human desire to interact with our environment, and it extends the capability of the smart devices we already use.

Before development started, this meant seeding a number of genetic markers in the Cube’s DNA:
Inspiration is spontaneous. Creativity is precious. Color is emotional.

These three ideas structured a unique approach to product development focused on the emotional use of the product. The result was a tech product that hides the tech.

SwatchMate’s key innovation is to radically simplify the hardware required to capture color, using powerful software algorithms instead of the brute-force approach of competing devices.

Ultimately, the approach of starting with a customer need first – extending our human desire for interaction – and identifying changing consumer trends toward connected devices helped create a simpler, greener product.

Easy to use. Hard to forget. The Cube is a companion device built with a unique emotional understanding of its users.

Sustainability

The focus on sustainability was across three key areas:

Reducing paint wastage - by capturing the perfect color every time, the Cube lets you buy the right paint, first time. No more wasting litres of sample paint before getting the perfect match. And no more need for single-use paint swatches.

Sustainable design - the Cube contains no materials that are biologically or chemically hazardous to the environment and is fully ROHS compliant.

Environmental awareness - by promoting interaction with the environment, the Cube encourages users to appreciate the beauty of the natural world. In a way, this forms a powerful desire to protect the beautiful world of colors.