iRobot's Director of Industrial Design Insun Hong explains how her team has made Roomba vacuums a more welcome addition to the home.

If the best tools are the ones that you use, it’s also true those very tools should be conveniently at hand ? a perspective complicated when it comes to robot vacuums. The cleaning appliances are designed to run with increasing autonomy, but perform best when stationed conspicuously out in the open, a requirement that comes into direct conflict with our propensity to want to hide away devices and appliances that just don’t quite mesh with the rest of the home, in turn making them less effective in the process.
It’s this very dilemma that motivated Director of Industrial Design Insun Hong and her small team at iRobot to design the Roomba Combo j9+ robot vacuum and mop with a base station that softens the line between necessary functionality and welcoming form. We spoke with the iRobot designer via Zoom about the challenges of imagining a smart home cleaning device you might come to love… but don’t necessarily ever want noticed.
Hi Insun, could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do"
Yes, I’m Insun Hong, the Director of Industrial Design at iRobot. I’ve been with iRobot for about six and a half years, and in that time I’ve built a small team of seven designers whose core function is to design the look and feel, alongside the user experiences, around our hardware. We work clos...