The Softer Side of Hardware

The secret behind Google’s breakout hardware products is its year-old Design Lab. Here’s an exclusive look inside.

An exclusive look inside Google’s Design Lab, where VP Ivy Ross (left) leads the effort to make beautiful, touchable tech.

THERE’S A BUILDING ON GOOGLE’S Mountain View, California, campus that’s off-limits to most of the company’s own employees. The 70,000-square-foot Design Lab, which opened last June, houses around 150 designers and dozens of top-secret projects under the leadership of VP and head of hardware design Ivy Ross, a former jewelry artist who has led the company’s push into gadgets ranging from the groundbreaking Google Home Mini speaker to the playful line of Pixel phones. Inside the lab— and away from the cubicle culture of the engineering-driven Googleplex—industrial designers, artists, and sculptors are free to collaborate. “Google’s blueprint for how they optimize is great for most people [at the company],” says Ross. “Designers need different things.”

Each space in the lab was constructed to help Ross’s team marry tactile experiences (understated, fabric-covered gadgets that feel at home in the home) with digital ones (Google’s unobtrusive UX). In the two-story, skylit atrium entrance, for example, a birchwood staircase leads to a library filled with the design team’s favorite books. “We’re the company that digitized the world’s information,” says Ross, “[but] sometimes, designers need to hold things.”

Inside, the lab has entire rooms devoted to colors and materials, along with curated collections of outside objects to inspire designers as they decide on Google’s palette and textiles. There are also Garage rooms (for working out engineering challenges), the Model Shop (where designers build prototypes), and an area with a pair of “refueling station” beds, where staff can lie back, don headphones, and recharge. The one thing in short supply: conference rooms. Most business meetings take place in other buildings. The lab, stresses Ross, “is a sanctuary to get the design work done.”

The two-story entrance to Google’s Design Lab serves as both a gathering spot for the building’s 150 or so employees and a library.

Hardware design chief Ivy Ross (right) and designer Leslie Greene compare colors across Google product lines, from Nest stands to Pixel phones, in the lab’s Color room. Designers hash out product schematics in one of the lab’s Garages.

Google designers, who often draw inspiration from everyday objects (including socks and carabiners), look at swatches for an unreleased wearable the team developed for the Milan Furniture Fair.

Hannah Somerville, the archivist for the Materials room library, arranges textile swatches above a museum-style display of objects that designers can peruse.

A pair of mesh Adidas by Stella Mccartney Pureboost sneakers are on display in the Materials room.

Sketches of the company’s last iteration of the Pixel phone hang on the walls of a Garage.