AwardsPloom
Core77 Design Awards, notable professional 2011

Tegu
Dwell on Design Best in Show 2011
Toy of the Year (TOTY) Awards, Specialty Toy 2014
Talks
2014
Power of Design: "Designer's Toolbox"
Appalachian State University

2012
Designing Change: “A look at how design thinking is shaping new business futures.”
San Francisco, CA

2009
DTS09. Design Thinking Symposium: “I’m Alex, this is Design Thinking”
Singapore
Publications
Contributor: Make Space: How to set the Stage for Creative Collaboration
Doorley, S., & Witthoft, S. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons

Patents
2015 “Single Serve Beverage Production Machine”
2016 “CLIP”
2016 “Seating Device Having Tilt Mechanism”

alexko.co

Alex Ko makes things.
Sometimes it’s food.
Sometimes it’s products.
Product DesignGraphic DesignFood

2025

Client
KJ Orchards

K&J Orchards was started in 1980 when a registered nurse and pomology professor fell in love while working together to grow Asian pears in Northern California. Their continued love and success grew into a business that supplies the best Bay Area and Napa Valley restaurants with premium fruit today.  Project
Asian Pear Cider

Aomboon Deasy, the next generation of K&J, hasn’t missed a beat. Besides continuing her parents’ good work, she started Pomet in 2022, Oakland’s answer to Chez Panisse to the north. Naturally, an Asian-pear cider concept was next.
Role
Graphic Design

Care was taken to create an identity that can appropriately stand out in the wine and spirits aisle, while faithfully communicating the craft and expertise of the parent company, K&J Orchards. 3 Concepts were developed, variations of an idea of “being amongst the trees”. 
Concept C Label


Concept B Label
Concept A Mockup

2021

Company
Periscope Homes

Periscope Homes was started in 2021 as a response to the perpetual California housing shortage. The founding team was ex-Tesla manufacturing engineers, bringing a wealth of technical expertise, both at the product level and manufacturing level.
Project
Product Development

Houses, by product standards, are art projects. Each one is different from the next, with varying levels of craft and quality. This makes them time-consuming to build, with constant corrections in every layer of material requiring hand-trimming and fitting. Our goal was to build a house like we would build a car. A car door for example, has specific features for the glazing, electrical power, insulation, and structure. By taking this approach, we wanted to build houses faster, cheaper, and better. Role
Creative Director

We developed concepts for the kit of parts and went to work building full-scale mockups. Prototypes were not just physical. Customer experience, real-world site requirements, and permitting quickly became challenges and opportunities. Despite some early success with a handful of units built, sadly we were not able overcome the impact of Covid to the construction supply chain and investment climate. Periscope closed its doors in 2023.
Cloudview Entry
Cloudview 


Cloudview Exploded View

2017

Client
Kodak

In 2017, your smart phone camera was still a bit of a toy. It would take photos and video, but not at the quality that could evoke emotion. In that small window, Kodak came to Fuse Project to begin an “analogue revolution” to showcase what film does best, add a difficult to describe warmth and character.
Project
Super 8

Being in a very digital age from the era the Super8 film originated, there were some added expectations: a real-time digital display, a capacitive touch display. All of this, interfacing in real time with a mechanical film transport flashing a window to the real world at 18 to 53 fps.  Role
Product Design Engineer

With ID surfaces from Fuse Project, and a novel linear shutter reference design from Logmar, we were tasked with creating a production solution for the Kodak super8. We were able to faithfully preserve the ID intent with a 5-axis CNC chassis+enclosure design, and create workable product architecture for this 300+ part assembly in our B1 builds. 

ARCH Model
5-Axis CNC Enclosure
B1 Prototype
CES
Industrial Design: Fuse Project
Design for Manufacturing: PCH Intl

2016

Client
Knoll

The Knoll HiLo is a lightweight, dynamic "perch" seat designed by Box Clever for active workspaces. introduced in 2016 to complement standing desks. It features a cushioned, adjustable seat (26–33 inches) and a flexible, spring-steel base designed to encourage movement, ease of portability, and impromptu collaboration. 
Project
Hi-Lo

Our team developed the product architecture, separating the overall gesture of the perch into discrete sub-assemblies with performance goals: flexible seat for perching and straddling, gas-spring support column, and flexing foot. Role
Product Design Engineer

This project is a great example of an iterative prototyping process. When you’re in new territory, the quickest way to get into the ballpark of a working design is to get physical. In this case, making prototype seat geometries and sit-testing them revealed subtleties of discomfort when straddling the seat vs. perching. Characterizing the forces on an Instron gave us real numbers to target as we progressed the design forward.


Seat Concept Analysis
Sit Testing
Instron Testing
Industrial Design: Box Clever
Design for Manufacturing: Knoll

2015

Client
Latch

Latch, a NYC-founded smart lock startup, transformed urban entry by replacing physical keys with app-based Bluetooth access, enabling easy deliveries and guest access in thousands of apartment buildings. The company, which was accelerated at Techstars NYC, became a staple of modern NYC residential security. 
Project
Smart Lock Module

In the context of NYC multi-unit apartment buildings, a lock that’s not binary makes a lot of sense. Dog walker: Give them a unique code. A camera, hidden in the center of lens verfies their identity upon entry. Guests or AirBnb: Create temporary codes with expiration dates. Owner: recognize their proximity via bluetooth and automatically unlock. Role
Product Design Engineer

Sometimes, the simple things are hard to do. The singular black lens is both capacitive touch, and deadfront, hiding not only special films and masks, but also a wide-angle camera. Made of ultrasonically welded polycarbonate, the lens is both tough and weather-sealed. Encrypted lines leading to another PCB on the opposite side of the door protect from electronic hacking.
..

PCB Module
Deadfront lens trials
IP65 and destructive test prototypes
Industrial Design: Thomas Meyerhoffer
Design for Manufacturing: PCH Intl

2011

Company
Ploom

Tobacco, I’m willing to guess, is one of the more polarizing topics one could tackle. It’s sort of like convincing your school that the class bully is now the class angel, or at the very least, the class nerd. Ploom aimed to convince you of just that. Ploom is a tobacco product for the 21st century, offering a modern alternative to smoking that takes a responsible point of view on health, ingredients, and technology. The technology consists of a pocket-vaporizer, called model One™, and hermetically sealed, single servings of tobacco, packed in anodized aluminum capsules called Pods™. Project
Identity and Packaging

Identity for such a polarizing topic is of course littered with land-mines. The Pod packaging was one-aspect of the experience where I thought we most successfully articulated our very different point of view on tobacco..Role
Creative Director

Ploom Pods came in almost-completely white boxes of 12. White was chosen to imply the cleanliness and additional care, just as it does in a pressed-shirt or table-cloth. White was also a good canvas for communicating vapor. Representing vapor graphically, somehow felt false. Vapor is ethereal, has physical dimension, and is highly responsive to light. For this reason, a simple emboss on a white surface seemed to be a more true representation. The vapor pattern repeated to form one large, white, composition when the Pod packs are tiled side by side. This large white face helps differentiated Ploom from the aggressive sea of color formed by other tobacco products, who largely use color as a brand identifier and navigation element on the store shelf.

Awards:
Core77 Design Awards, notable professional 2011

2009

Client
Tegu Toys

Tegu started as a mission, more specifically, a mission for brothers Chris and Will Haughey to help people of Honduras. They had identified that wood exports, specifically mahagony, was an asset to leverage. Project
Next-Generation Wooden Toy

The original brief was simple: create the next-generation wooden toy. Role
Product Designer

A project brief as blue-sky as this one can be dis-orienting. It was very useful to start with the user: kids who play with constuctivist toys. We established connections with a number of Bay-Area schools and through a series of play-stidies, noticed an interesting observation: kids were having as much fun destroying their creations as they were making them. This was subtle, but this emotion combined with the lasting attraction the magnetic prototype amongst all the concepts, eventually led to Tegu magnetic wooden blocks.

Magic Block Prototype
Awards:
Dwell on Design Best in Show 2011
Toy of the Year (TOTY) Awards, Specialty Toy 2014
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