The Formation of Matternet

In 2012 I reconnected with Andreas Raptopoulos. I'd tried to incorporate his smart sound-wall tech into nook when I was working on the launch for Barnes & Noble. When we spoke he told me that he'd sold his business and he'd just graduated from Singularity University.

But when he told me his graduating business thought I was gobsmacked. Andreas had the idea to use autonomous quadcopter's (drones) to transport diagnostic samples in places where there was little access to all season roads. More than a billion people live in areas where roads become impassable meaning they loose access to all the trappings of regular transportation. No vaccines, no blood tests and little medicine.

The company was called Matternet. They were about to deploy a pilot study in Haiti and The Dominican Republic and they needed an new identity. Andreas introduced me to his cofounder Paola Santana who I fell in love with immediately. And I said I'd create the identity.

It's very hard for anyone who hasn't experienced it to imagine living without roads. Although the global road system is only a few hundred years old it's ingrained into our collective psyche. But, it costs more than $1,000,000 a mile to build and maintain a road, this places it outside of the budget for most emerging economies.

Like mobile telephony, where emerging economies leap-frogged the need for copper lines, maybe they could also leap-frog the need for complex road systems? 

Matternet felt like an astounding name. The idea of an internet of physical goods seemed like the eventual outcome of iOT, but the connection to vehicles that can fly autonomously seemed magical.

The word Matternet also contained 3 letter T's. I started to think that Google had mapped the wrong thing. The physical map seemed dominated by roads and rivers. Drones flew in unrestricted low level air-space, they we navigating in a dimension that Google hadn't mapped – they were behind. The Matternet map is multi dimensional.

I started sketching a symbol which represented the intersection of three dimensional space. But as I sketched, I wanted to make the logo a physical object, a piece if matter. I arrived at a 3D form rendered in 2D. An intersection of Longitude, Latitude and Altitude. An atom of matter.

Nicole Yeo wonderfully volunteered to transform my sketch into a thoughtfully crafted mark. Sunjin Kim extended the core mark into a set of interface icons. Lastly, Ido Baruchin, Matternet's designer created a 3D model which we printed in later centered aluminum. 

The Matternet symbol has appeared on Vehicles which have flown in Malawi, Bhutan, Papua New Guinea, Haiti and Switzerland. Andreas gave a TED global talk in 2013 which has been seen by more than Nine Hundred Thousand People. 

https://www.ted.com/…/andreas_raptopoulos_no_roads_there_s_…

Eventually I joined Matternet as Chief Experience Officer at the end of 2013, I was employee number 2. It was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. My second large project with Matternet was to work with our deeply talented design lead Ido Baruchin on our first vehicle M1.

We understood the primary problem, many of the roads that carried diagnostic samples were unreliable leaving some communities cut-off for months. But the underlying problem was also too real. Many of the communities we'd be serving associated drones with something far from help. Although the benefit they could bring was clear, it was also clear that Drones had an experience problem.

From the outset Andreas was adamant that the vehicles should be beautiful. It was hard for me to understand initially, thinking it better to create a more pragmatic Land Rover for the skies.

The more I thought about the idea of beauty, the more clarity I found. We had to create vehicles that people could trust, part of the that trust building is to create something that people would love. Beauty revealed itself to be at the very heart of acceptance and trust.

So, we needed to build a vehicle which rethought the experience and one which was beautiful, but there was a third part of the brief. M1 would be the first transportation drone. Up until the launch drones had largely been for imaging or surveillance – we had to be sure that just from the silhouette this vehicle looked like it was carrying something.

Ido did initial models and sketches, and I researched the idea of carrying something valuable. Ido has always used the color red to denote the Box, it intrigued me. I began to think of the most important payload of all, a child.

Dionne Trowse was pregnant with Spike, and the care with which she moved, ate, exercised was hypnotic. I asked Ido if we could design a drone where the payload was in the middle.

This created many engineering challenges. Due to weight distribution the heaviest part of the vehicle should be underneath. Ido and I worked very late through many evenings until we discovered the idea of a transmissive space through the middle of the vehicle.This meant that people could load the drone from the top and the payload could be dropped out of the bottom. 

We also considered that the drone went through an experience flow. Initially when loading it would be in an inferior position, in take off it would be at its most aggressive and eventually it would be virtual controlled through an interface.

This is where my skills ended, to see Ido sculpt this thought into a form, and consider stripping the form for weight, adding structural strength to create stiffness was a marvel. We enjoyed so much ferrying the ideas from 2D to 3D across time and experience. When Ido created the signature arch which revealed the red of the payload box I knew the design had become iconic.

M1 was a unique vehicle for many reasons. It was printed entirely using a proprietorial compound. It loaded from the top and the bottom. It was autonomous, meaning that once it received instruction it could self fly beyond range of GPS.

But the most amazing part of the experience of working on this was to see the integration of hardware, electronic stack and software. There were so many people working together to create something unique.

M1 was launched in March 2015, it flew in Malawi with Unicef, Switzerland with Swiss Cargo and Swiss Post. It is to be awarded an amazing prize very soon and Matternet were awarded the Technology Pioneer from the World Economic Forum in 2015.

A truly astounding piece of design.