Light, sound, and time-aware experiences for the smart home

Sonos partnered with Above to expand its smart home offering beyond audio, exploring how light, sound, and time-aware products and services could become part of customers' daily lives.

With circadian rhythm as a grounding framework, the team developed a suite of concepts around "Sonos Ambience" — a layered system pairing ambient light and sound that could coexist with, and enhance, foreground content like music, podcasts, and video. Concepts spanned preset scenes for moments across the day, multimodal controls that let users steer light and sound together, and an ambience system that could expand and contract across Sonos devices and third-party modalities.

As the Lead Interaction Designer on the team, I designed the interaction paradigms and control mechanisms across mobile and on-device UI, collaborating directly with Sonos stakeholders throughout. The work covered how users discover and launch experiences, blend light and sound to their liking, and transition between active listening and ambient background modes. The project culminated in a UX concept video spanning morning to evening, which fed into the continued development of Symfonisk, Sonos and IKEA's light-and-sound product family.