Co-founder and director of Those — the hardware startup behind Joto, a robotic drawing board that raised over £700,000 and won the public vote at the Design Museum’s Beazley Designs of the Year.
Joto turns digital information into pen-and-ink drawings — described by some as a digital Etch-A-Sketch. The ambition was to build a hardware and software ecosystem that made everyday digital interaction feel precious, drawing on the same appetite that had revived Polaroid cameras and Super 8 film. As co-founder and director, I led product vision, design strategy and brand, secured investment, directed product marketing, and grew the company from a sketch to a factory-produced product shipping to customers around the world.
Joto raised over £392,000 through Kickstarter and Indiegogo, £216,000 through Crowdcube, won first prize at the WeWork Creator Awards, and took the public’s choice award at the Design Museum’s Beazley Designs of the Year. The first factory-made unit rolled off the production line in Shenzhen within 24 months of the company’s founding.
How Joto works
Joto is controlled by a cloud-based app that lets users create, discover and share content called Jots — illustrations, messages, lists, anything that can be drawn. When a Jot arrives, Joto wipes its surface clean and springs to life, drawing in real time. The software integrates with Twitter, Trello, Spotify, Amazon Echo and Slack, and a public API opened the platform to anyone who wanted to build on it.
What Joto can do
Joto is a blank slate — its function defined entirely by context. On a kitchen wall it becomes a family noticeboard. On a studio desk it streams artwork from illustrators around the world. In a café it displays the daily menu. The same device, a dozen different lives.
Origin: the Woodpecker
Joto began as the Woodpecker — a 3D-printed vertical plotter that could turn any smooth surface into a large-format interactive display. Nobody had yet built a fast, sub-millimetre accurate plotter that mounted on both horizontal and vertical surfaces. Advertising agencies soon found it: Marks & Spencer and Unilever commissioned experiential campaigns using the technology, and the Woodpecker caught the attention of the Central Research Laboratory, which offered Those a scholarship to join their inaugural hardware accelerator programme.
The critical insight
The accelerator gave us the space and pressure to ask a harder question: what problem does this actually solve? People loved watching the Woodpecker draw, but that wasn’t a scalable business. We ran interviews with previous clients and hands-on user testing sessions until a clear insight emerged: people were drawn to the Woodpecker not because of what it did, but because of what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a screen. In a world where all our content is stuck behind glass, so are we. That was the problem worth solving.
Strategy and MVP
With investment needed fast, the strategy was to narrow the product to a single compelling use case: letting anyone instantly download and display physical artwork from professional illustrators around the world. Win the design community first, then expand. This gave us a focused brief for the MVP and a clear story for investors — a platform with an obvious primary market and a wide expansion path.
User journeys and flows
Field research was translated into standardised user journeys across the primary and secondary use cases. Mapping the existing pain-points in buying and displaying art — six friction points from discovery to hanging — made the brief concrete: Joto had to collapse a process that took days into something that took seconds.
Wireframing and iteration
User flows were rapidly wireframed and put in front of the testing group. Each round of feedback sharpened the app design — simplifying decisions, reducing steps, making the core interaction of sending a Jot feel as immediate as possible.
Product design
In parallel, the Woodpecker’s mechanics had to be condensed into something that could live in a home — friendly and unobtrusive, no larger than an A2 sheet of paper. Multiple physical prototypes were designed, built and tested through the same iterative cycle as the app: sketch, build, test, refine.
Design for manufacture
Throughout the design sprint, DFM specialists in Shenzhen were brought in early to stress-test every decision against manufacturing constraints and budget. Getting design and manufacture talking to each other from the start — rather than handing over at the end — was what made it possible to hit the production timeline.
Joto no.1
Within 24 months of founding, the first factory-made Joto rolled off the production line in Shenzhen. From a string-and-wood prototype in a studio to a precision-manufactured consumer product — in two years.
Building a community
Before the Kickstarter launch, the go-to-market strategy centred on building creative credibility. Hundreds of illustrators and designers — including Anthony Burrill and Mr. Bingo — were brought in to make short films showcasing Joto drawing their work. The clips spread across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, generating millions of impressions and thousands of pre-orders before a single unit shipped.
