Concept

Motorola’s Moto Stereo Speaker Mod features as one of the mobile lifestyle accessories, designed to easily snaps onto the back of Moto Z smartphones. This simple attachment mechanism delivers surprisingly powerful sound from the high-quality, double driver system, and without the hassle of connecting via Bluetooth. The radial speaker pattern and circular full-metal kickstand provide superior product performance. With its sporty design and cleverly integrated stand, it led to the esteemed recognition of the Motorola Design Team, including the prestigious 2020 iF Design Award and the 2018 Red Dot Design Award.

Production Development

The Moto Stereo Speaker Mod faced a challenge for a careful color matching between neighboring parts made of different materials. This complexity was further intensified by the geographical separation between the design team in Chicago and multiple suppliers based in China. Through close collaboration and communication with our design team in Chicago, we took the lead in taking actions locally and successfully overcame this challenge.

The project was executed in line with Motorola’s CMF palette of the year, which featured a lively and saturated choices of colors. It’s essential to strike the right balance of color saturation when dealing with metals. Overly intense saturation could compromise the inherent quality of metal materials. Our primary objective was to find the perfect saturation level during anodizing that harmonized with the plastic neighbors while preserving the metal’s premium sophistication from beadblasting. With this approach, Moto Stereo Speaker Mod keeps the premium elegance of anodized and beadblasted metal.

Launch

_{Deliverable: From production builds to launch
Industry: Consumer tech
Company: Motorola (a Lenovo company)
Team: Rina Shin, Kobe Ding, Chicago design team
Year: 2018}