◆case studyDAWN—01

dawn
clock radio

Replacing the phone on your nightstand with a single dial

What's the first thing you did this morning? You probably picked up your phone. Dawn is a wooden clock radio designed to take its place — it shows the time, lets you explore the airwaves, and wakes you with local community radio, all through one rotary dial. No notifications, no feeds; just a local voice and the sounds of your city waking up with you.

01Role

Product design
& UX

02Timeline

46 weeks
2025–26

03Course

Senior Capstone
UT Austin

04Tools

Rhino · KiCad ·
Figma · Wood

the brief 01 — context

one dial.
no feeds.

Taking cues from Teenage Engineering's Playdate and Apple's iPod click wheel, the challenge I set was deliberately strict: everything Dawn does is controlled through a single rotary dial. The constraint forced clarity — the device can only do what one hand, one motion can express.

key shotproduct

key shot · detaildetail

DAWN clock radio product key shot, detail

Dawn is aimed at young adults who feel their phone creeping into the edges of the day — the last thing at night, the first thing in the morning. It offers a calmer ritual in those moments.

FM radio is the answer to the feed. It's live and passive: you tune in and something is already happening, and has been happening — a local voice, a familiar station — which builds a greater sense of community than anything you scroll.

on the nightstandwho it's for

DAWN in context on a nightstand, with its intended audience

fm radio is live and passive,
you tune in and something is already happening
it builds a greater sense of active community.

finding the form 02 — ideation

from cylinder
to pill.

I prototyped in cardboard before anything else. Early cylindrical forms looked clean but failed in the hand — you couldn't hold the body and work the dial one-handed. Iterating on the silhouette led to a compact, pill-shaped form that sits naturally under the fingers.

early studiessketch

DAWN early ideation sketches and studies

one-hand testscardboard

DAWN cardboard prototypes testing single-hand use

making it real 03 — material · circuit · interface

wood was a functional choice.

Wood started as an aesthetic instinct and turned out to be essential: the resonant warmth it gives the dial's click is part of the product's character. Each of the three housings has a laser-cut faceplate, a hand-shaped body, 3D-printed internal brackets and a dark acrylic screen.

cylinder to pillsilhouette study

DAWN form evolution from cylinder to compact pill shape

hand-shapingin the shop

Hand-shaping the DAWN wooden housings on the workbench

stacked housingswooden build

Three hand-shaped wooden DAWN housings stacked on the workbench

a board built from scratch.

To reach the compact form, I designed a custom PCB in KiCad that unifies every component on a single board — removing the wiring constraints that would otherwise dictate the size and shape of the enclosure.

pcb · reverseback

pcb · assembledcustom board

pcb · facefront

breadboard rigbreadboard

DAWN breadboard prototype — every component wired up before the custom PCB

four screens,
three gestures.

The whole interface — clock, radio, alarm and settings — maps to just three inputs on the dial: rotate, press, and double-press. A contextual gesture language, carried by smooth animation, keeps that small vocabulary legible across every screen.