When we set out to design OneMira C1, we knew it had to be a physical desktop device. We explicitly rejected creating another mobile app. A smartphone is a notification magnet—the moment you unlock it to hit 'record' on a meeting app, you are pulled into a stream of Slack pings, emails, and calendar popups. Design trade-offs require focus, and focus requires physical boundaries.

But finding the right physical form took weeks of trial and error. Here is our log of the concepts we designed, tested, and ultimately threw in the scrap bin.

The Wearable Forms We Scrapped

Our initial CAD drafts explored three wearable designs, which we 3D-printed and wore for a week:

  1. The Smart Wristband: We printed a TPU strap holding our microphone module. It was a disaster. Typing on a keyboard with a wristband feels clunky, and every stroke generated loud friction noise as sleeves rubbed against the mic ports. The audio was unusable.
  2. The Neck Pendant: A clip-on pendant modeled after HeyPocket or Limitless. While it avoided keyboard friction, it introduced severe clothing rustle and picked up the user's breathing too loudly. Worse, it created social friction—peers at the whiteboard kept glancing at it defensively, unsure if they were being recorded.
  3. The Circular Puck: A simple puck on the desk. This was comfortable, but it was constantly buried under paper folders, iPads, or coffee cups. Its lack of orientation also meant users never knew if the microphone array was pointing at them or the wall.

The Naked Square: Transparent Casing and Raw Hardware

We eventually realized that "slick consumer design" was the wrong path. We didn't want another featureless white pebble on our desks. As developers, we appreciate the raw beauty of functional hardware: exposed PCBs, visible traces, and mechanical components.

We settled on a flat, square transparent casing. By making the top shell completely clear, the inner workings—the vibrant green custom PCB, the stark blue base layer, and the mechanical motor—are proudly visible. It’s an honest design that hides nothing.

The 33 RPM Privacy Turntable

A major design goal was eliminating 'surveillance anxiety.' Blinking red LEDs feel aggressive and untrustworthy. We wanted an analog state indicator that was visible across the room but felt soft and intentional.

We designed a physical rotating vinyl-like disk mounted directly onto the exposed motor. When the device is recording, the micro-motor slowly rotates the disk at 33 RPM. When you stop recording, the mechanical disk grinds to a halt. Anyone in the room can verify that the microphone is off simply by seeing the static disk through the transparent casing. However, introducing a moving motor next to sensitive microphones created a massive acoustic vibration problem—which we had to solve in our EVT phase.