ALEX DE STASIO

Role: Lead Industrial Designer

Timeline: Started project April 2021 // Launching 2026

Team: 1 Industrial Designer, 1 Product Manager, 6 Mechanical Engineers

Origin Sensor Pods in Origin’s first iteration were designed by Honda Studio. As Cruise developed more sophisticated and proprietary sensors, they decided to bring the design of the sensors in-house. I led the industrial design of the Model Year ‘26 Sensor Pods and navigated a complex set of sensor positioning and cleaning requirements to create a design that feels integrated into the vehicle, while also standing out as one of the vehicle’s most important elements—its eyes.

The sensors include radars, lidars, optical cameras, and microphones. They point in many difference directions to ensure they have complete visibility around the car. This made for a unique design challenge to integrate them into a form that felt intentional and not too visually complex. The engineering team and I developed a three-layer architecture which allows the form to be broken into three separate levels. These levels gave us relative flexibility to adjust the sensor positions slightly without destroying the design intent. The three-layer design also breaks up the form into separate parts to reduce the visual mass of the pods, with CMF accentuating the division. Though some protrusion is necessary for the sensors to maintain visibility, reducing the visual mass is critical to integrate the pods into the vehicle and make them appear unthreatening.