Designing for the Future: Exploring PassiveLogic’s Design Philosophy

Intentional design is the guiding force of every element of PassiveLogic’s technology ecosystem—centering users’ experience and needs through every step of the design process.

Our commitment to superior user design has earned PassiveLogic global recognition. Earlier this year, PassiveLogic won the iF DESIGN AWARD—a top international design award—for the Hive Autonomous Platform. With this win, PassiveLogic joins the ranks of famous global design innovators like Apple.

As part of advancing our deliberate design process, PassiveLogic recently announced Daniel Frysinger as our Head of Design. He joins us most recently from iRobot where he was Head of Digital Design and Hardware UX. Daniel brings his focus on designing technology products grounded in empathy to the PassiveLogic design philosophy of maximizing users’ value and happiness. He earned his undergrad degree in cognitive science with a focus on artificial intelligence and his masters program focused on Human Computer Interaction.

We sat down for a conversation with Daniel and Travis Anna Hallstrom, PassiveLogic’s Head of Product, to discuss PassiveLogic’s design philosophy, focus on user experience, and what Daniel is most excited to work on at PassiveLogic.

PassiveLogic describes itself as a design-led company. What does that mean?

Travis: Since its inception, PassiveLogic has differed from the typical technology company’s product development philosophy. Many companies assemble a list of features they want their product to have and then piecemeal assemble the product together. Unfortunately, as a user, you can tell; the product often lacks coherence and flow between the different steps.

In contrast, the user’s workflow is the starting input for how we design and build our products at PassiveLogic. Our work begins with the end in the mind and then we design the technology stack to ensure we support those specific outcomes. We want the experience to be efficient and effective for everyone, no matter how they use PassiveLogic’s technology.

Daniel: I’ve never worked at a company that was both so user- and design-centric. It’s been really astonishing to me to explore how much design thinking forms the basis of all of the cross-disciplinary planning and product architecture. Every product is geared around the user’s needs.

To echo what Travis said, in the technology world, it’s really common to start designing technology based on a single person’s ideas. PassiveLogic’s approach is so different—beginning with a complex problem space and then working cross functionally and collaboratively to create new optimizations and solutions by thinking about the problem holistically.

PassiveLogic has built an ecosystem of hardware and software tools for users. Why did PassiveLogic adopt this approach?

Travis: Building an ecosystem makes each individual product richer for the users. We’ve designed tools for creating and managing buildings that alone are powerful, but when combined with the Quantum Standard and QuantumSync, our technology enables new efficiencies. Users can open any project and the changes they make will sync across all of the applications.

Daniel: PassiveLogic could have started with one product, one small solution, but taking on the ambitious goal of creating a whole ecosystem reflects PassiveLogic’s user-centric design philosophy. The collective value of the suite of tools is orders of magnitude more valuable than a single tool. Without creating a whole ecosystem, we would no different than what our competitors are creating: more silos and friction.

I’m excited to help progress an integrated solution that enables all of the disparate pieces of a building’s life cycle to come together and to be more than the sum of their parts, making users’ lives easier and more convenient.

What does a great user experience look like and feel like for the user?

Travis: Great UX feels frictionless and inevitable. As a user I can say, “I am trying to do XYZ and here, I readily see the parts that help me accomplish this.” The user feels like they are in charge and forging ahead, but behind the scenes, their actions have been considered and the path has been created to help them achieve their goals.

Daniel: It feels like seamless magic—magic with which one can move seamlessly from one paradigm to another. Apple has done this well as a user can start something on their phone and finish it on their computer. Yet there’s this belief in more technical, non-consumer industries that we can’t make it just as easy.

But we are.

PassiveLogic is building tools that are far more technically complicated, but we’re working towards that same end and creating an ecosystem that enables seamless integration.

At PassiveLogic, we say that buildings are the world’s most complex robots. Can you elaborate?

Travis: Before CEO and co-founder Troy Harvey founded PassiveLogic, he was the CEO of an energy engineering firm that designed and built next-generation high-performance buildings. In this role, he observed that buildings never fully realized their engineering goals, especially energy-saving goals, which led him and his team to evaluate these problems from a robotic theory perspective.

The resulting insights showed that buildings are not only very complex robots, but also the most complex automated systems. They're comprised of hundreds of independent, yet wholly unique, interdependent systems. No building in the world is the same; each building has different internal systems, a particular use-case, and is impacted by its exterior environment in unique ways. Enabling these complex systems to finally reach their engineering goals requires building a whole new ecosystem of technologies.

Daniel: Before PassiveLogic, I hadn’t considered buildings as a robotics challenge. I’m intimately familiar with creating robotics technology that goes into your home that a consumer would see, but it’s a new paradigm to see the space in which we spend most of our time as a dynamic, changing robotics challenge.

Joining PassiveLogic has peeled back the layers on this new robotics challenge. We’re still relying on Apollo 13-era technology to control these incredibly complex systems. No one has spent any time trying to do it differently, but the reality is that great hardware supported by serious software and groundbreaking AI can transform buildings from reactive, black box disjointed systems into dynamic, coordinated assets, reflecting the complexity and interrelationships of their constituent systems. Better technology transforms the value proposition of the built world.

I am excited to reimagine buildings and controlled systems—to consider how every part of the building can be leveraged as a resource to make interacting with a building better. PassiveLogic’s technology not only improves users’ lives, but also enables us to solve other pressing challenges like energy consumption by designing a product that solves a critical business need while also solving a myriad of problems for the user.

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To learn more about PassiveLogic, watch our Fall 2023 Launch Event

Instead in joining the team to help build the first platform to enable autonomous robots? Check out our open positions.