Pentagram partner and industrial designer Jon Marshall recently headed up a demanding project: Design a form for an entirely new type of camera. Marshall and his team started fresh, studying the new hyperspectral technology pioneered by client Living Optics.
Jon Marshall and team have designed a new hyperspectral camera for Living Optics, translating a complex and rapidly evolving imaging technology into a distinctive, scalable product family.
Living Optics approached Pentagram with a very specific need—to take the core technology that had been demonstrated in a functional prototype and develop a design language that could be applied to a first generation product/development kit and then later to manufactured units.
Living Optics is pioneering cost-effective, high-frame-rate hyperspectral imaging, a technology that captures more than ten times the data of traditional RGB cameras. While our eyes and most cameras detect red, green and blue light, hyperspectral imaging captures many more bands, including information beyond the visible spectrum. This reveals things we can’t normally see, with applications ranging from assessing crop health to identifying materials and supporting non-invasive healthcare diagnostics.
A study of the underlying optics led to the camera’s distinctive L-shaped form. More than just a visual signature, its geometry accommodates different approaches to the lens assembly and scales across future product sizes as the optical architecture develops.
The anodised aluminium body can be CNC machined, allowing the design to be tested and refined across successive manufacturing batches. It draws on familiar codes of cameras, computing and precision instrumentation, while its purity and simplicity reflect the software-driven experience.
The camera sits at the heart of a wider architecture spanning edge compute, lighting, tripod, protective case and field accessories. From the outset, the team considered not just a single object but the whole product family, establishing a coherent industrial design language that’s flexible enough to accommodate new forms, materials and generations of Living Optics technology.
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