Aeris
A rechargeable purifier for apartments under sixty square metres, built around a filter people actually replace and an acoustic profile quieter than the fridge it stands next to.
- Year
- 2024
- Category
- Consumer appliance
- Role
- Lead Industrial Designer
- Client
- Confidential — consumer hardware startup
- Timeline
- 11 months, concept to tooling release
- Team
- 2 ID, 4 ME, 2 EE, 1 acoustics consultant
- Status
- In production
The brief
The client came to us with a working airflow platform and a problem they had already half-diagnosed: their first-generation product had excellent lab numbers and terrible retention. Filters went unchanged. Units ended up in cupboards. The brief as written asked for “a more premium enclosure.”
That was not the problem. Two weeks of home visits made it obvious that the failure was behavioural, not aesthetic. The filter change required a screwdriver, a manual, and the confidence to pull hard on a part that felt like it might break. Roughly two thirds of the owners we visited had never opened the machine at all — and a purifier with a saturated filter is a fan with a bad conscience.
So we rewrote the brief around a single measurable target: a first-time user should be able to change the filter, unprompted, in under thirty seconds, without instructions. Everything else — the form language, the CMF, the cordless architecture — was developed in service of that number. Replace this section with your own project's framing story; the structure of brief, complication and reframed target travels well across categories.
What the research changed
Three findings did most of the work. Each one closed off a direction we had been treating as obvious, which is the only reliable sign that research is earning its budget. Methods: contextual inquiry across eighteen sites, competitive teardown of six units, and two rounds of formative testing with printed rigs.
Nobody reads the manual
Twelve of eighteen households could not locate the filter compartment without help. Four believed the unit had no user-serviceable parts at all.
The machine gets moved constantly
Owners relocated the unit between rooms an average of 2.3 times per week, but every competitor on the market was tethered to a wall socket.
Silence is the real feature
Every participant who had stopped using their purifier cited noise first. Not aesthetics, not cost, not filter price — noise.
Four decisions that shaped it
Airflow architecture
We tested six intake geometries on a flow bench before committing to a 360° radial intake with a top-mounted exhaust. The radial approach cost us 8 mm of diameter but eliminated the directional placement problem entirely — the unit works the same regardless of which way it faces, which matters enormously for a product that gets carried between rooms.
The filter as a designed object
The filter cartridge was redrawn as a visible, handled component with its own colour and texture. It reads as a consumable in the way a coffee capsule does. A single quarter-turn releases it; the bayonet detent is tuned to 4 N·m so it feels deliberate rather than loose.
Acoustic development
Blade count, volute geometry and the intake grille pitch were developed together with our acoustics consultant across nineteen printed test articles. We moved the dominant tone from 340 Hz — squarely in the range the ear finds most irritating — up into a broadband hiss that reads as ventilation rather than machinery.
Cordless architecture
A 4-cell pack sits in the base, doubling as ballast for tip stability. Charging happens through a contact ring in the base so the unit can simply be set down on its plate — no plug to align, no port to fill with dust.
Specification
The long tail of the programme was tolerance stack-ups, part consolidation and assembly sequencing, run jointly with engineering. Headline figures from the released specification below.
Outcome
Numbers are the fastest way to make a case study credible, so include them even when they are modest. If a programme was cancelled, say so and say what you learned.
Credits
Work shown with permission. Some details altered or omitted under NDA.