Aether
Designing a smart home system from hardware to app
Overview
Aether was a student startup built inside the Apple Developer Academy in Brazil. The goal was simple but ambitious: make home automation accessible in a market where it barely existed. We were a team of five, two hardware engineers, two software developers, and me as the sole product designer. I owned the entire design surface: product vision, app design, brand identity, packaging, onboarding, and user research.
Challenge
Home automation in Brazil was expensive, complex, and built for tech enthusiasts. The hardware itself was not the hard part. Making it feel like something anyone could set up, trust, and want in their home was. Our physical adapter, Lumni, needed to feel as considered as the software it connected to. From day one, I worked directly with the hardware engineers to align the physical and digital experience into a single cohesive vision.
Process
Defining the product vision
Before any screen, I worked with the team to define three design principles that would govern every decision: simplicity, performance, and identity. These applied equally to the physical adapter and the digital app. A product that looked considered on the shelf had to feel just as considered at setup and every day after.
Designing hardware and software together
I collaborated directly with the hardware engineers throughout the process, not just at handoff. Lighting behavior, the moment a lamp responds to a user action, was treated as an interaction design problem, not just an engineering one. The Lumni adapter had the brand mark molded directly onto its casing. The physical and digital had to feel like one product.
Building the app experience
I designed the full iOS app across five flows: onboarding, lamp setup, home, settings, and scenes. The onboarding used QR code pairing to eliminate the friction that kills most smart home setups. The scenes feature let users define lighting behaviors tied to time, location, or habit, moving the product from remote control to ambient intelligence.
Testing with real users and iterating
I ran beta tests with four real users, observing both the unboxing experience and the full app setup flow. The insights shaped every refinement. Feedback covered the physical packaging, the pairing process, and the app interactions. Each session revealed friction points that no prototype could have surfaced.
Setting up the Lumni adapter in Aether via HomeKit
Solution
The result was a complete product: a physical smart lamp adapter, full iOS app published to the App Store, branded packaging with QR code activation card, and an open-source release of all design assets via Notion and GitHub for the community to build on.
Presentation
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Impact
Beta testers noticed the details that usually go unnoticed. One said: "You managed to reproduce very well the feeling of opening a smart light from a consolidated brand." Another: "I loved the care you put on everything. The logo on the adapter, the card with the QR code. It shows that you put effort into creating a great experience." The app shipped to the App Store and all design assets were made open to the community.
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