Jacob Waites
I design, prototype, and build brands and interactions full of expressive type, fun motion, bold colors, and minimal line-work. Sometimes I write and speak about design. My craft is the way I speak to the world, I work to help others find their voice and make them successful.
Homestead
Homestead is a oil cooled shield for bitcoin miners that produce heat to warm homes. Miners can be put together in an enclosure called the Hearth that acts as a space heater. Design fiction from CoLab's finest.
Homestead was a prototype that came from CoLab’s exploits in bitcoin mining. We found that when we ran our antminer inside of the studio, it was very loud and hot, and didn’t produce enough bitcoin to make the whole ordeal tolerable. We created a small project team to work on an enclosure for the unit that got rid of the fan to make it silent, and could harness the heat it would produce as something useful.
The project team devised an enclosure that encased the entire miner in oil to cool it, attaching to the back of the unit a thick aluminum heatsink. With this, the H miner was born. The device could be thought of as a building block for a modular set of applications. A single H unit could be a portable heater when turned on, complete with a mobile carrying handle. Larger arrays could act as a space heater, or even hot water heaters in larger outfits. One of the mechanical engineers on the project sketched out an entire apartment kitchen rail system that would act as a modular hot water delivery system for multiple appliances that tenants could take advantage of.
On the project, we produced small prototypes, renders of the final product, a brand, and a marketing website for the product in 4 days. I created the website prototype and multiple sacrificial brand directions for the Homestead.
Website
You can view an old prototype of the website here, along with the video recording below.Brand
In addition to designing the website experience I developed many different logo directions for the product, along with voice notes for telling the story of Homestead.
