Modern households involve countless ongoing coordination tasks. Scheduling, household responsibilities, shopping and meal planning, as well as information scattered across different household members and digital platforms, together form an increasingly complex system of household management.

Nori Family Hub combines AI capabilities with the accompanying Nori App to organize fragmented information into a shared interface, while integrating voice interaction to enable household members to access information, manage schedules, and participate in everyday routines together. Nori Family Hub and the Nori App together create a Family AI product experience. Through this project, UDL and Domus Next explored a new direction for Family AI, reconsidering the role of technology within the home: as AI begins to exist continuously in domestic spaces, how should it be present, and how should its presence be experienced?

Designing AI as Part of the Home

The home environment differs significantly from typical consumer electronics scenarios. Devices such as smartphones and computers are often designed around individual productivity, while Nori Family Hub needs to exist continuously in shared areas such as kitchens and living rooms, serving household members with different ages, habits, and needs.

Smart hardware often expresses its capabilities through futuristic forms, complex interfaces, and visible technological elements. Once introduced into domestic spaces, however, products also need to respond to the warmth, scale, and intimacy of the existing environment. UDL and Domus Next therefore pursued a quieter and more restrained design approach, allowing technology to enter everyday life in a comfortable and understated way.

We took the “photo frame” as the conceptual prototype for the product. A photo frame has long existed within domestic spaces while maintaining a subtle visual presence. Its ability to adapt to different furniture styles, interior environments, and placement scenarios provides AI hardware with a form that feels closer to everyday life.

A Frame That Evolves with the Home

Household life is constantly changing, while consumer electronics often enter different homes with fixed physical forms.

Based on this observation, UDL developed an interchangeable frame system for Nori Family Hub. Users can easily replace the outer frame and select different materials and colors according to their interior environment, allowing the same device to adapt to different household scenarios. The system also leaves room for future extensions, such as developing softer and safer frame solutions for households with young children.

The interchangeable frame keeps the product form open: while the core hardware remains stable, the part most directly connected to the home environment can continue to evolve with changing spaces, aesthetics, and stages of life. The final expression of the product is shaped together by users and the environments they inhabit.

Integrating Acoustics into the Form

Voice interaction is one of the core interaction methods of Nori Family Hub, requiring the product to support both far-field voice pickup and sound output. The “photo frame” design concept also introduced new engineering challenges: traditional smart displays typically position microphone arrays and speakers around the device body, while the interchangeable frame system covers these conventional locations. Adding separate acoustic openings or dedicated speaker areas would compromise the visual integrity of the photo frame form.

UDL therefore designed a circular structural channel approximately 4mm wide between the display panel and the outer frame. This structure visually becomes part of the photo frame while functioning as the product’s acoustic interface. The microphone array and speakers are integrated within this area, allowing essential technical components to be embedded into the product structure and transforming the space required by technology into part of the product’s physical expression.

This solution required balancing industrial design, structural configuration, acoustic performance, and voice algorithm requirements. UDL worked with acoustic and algorithm engineering teams through multiple rounds of testing and validation, continuously optimizing voice pickup and sound output performance.

Privacy as a Physical Interaction

Household life contains a significant amount of private information and everyday details. When AI becomes a long-term presence within this environment, trust becomes an essential part of the product experience. Users need to clearly understand how AI participates in their lives while maintaining control over the level of technological involvement.

Based on this consideration, UDL designed a dedicated physical AI switch for Nori Family Hub.

The only clearly branded detail on the front of Nori Family Hub is a small metallic tag positioned between the display and the outer frame. The Nori logo is integrated into the surface in a manner reminiscent of a traditional object label, while also functioning as a control for disabling AI voice interaction. Without entering software menus, users can turn off the device’s voice function through a clear physical action, allowing AI to temporarily step away from the environment.

Nori Family Hub adopts a camera-free design, further defining the boundaries of technology within private domestic spaces and making trust and security an integral part of the product experience.

Designed Around Everyday Life

Nori Family Hub supports both desktop placement and wall-mounted installation, adapting to different environments including kitchen countertops, living room cabinets, and shared family areas.

Designed around these two usage scenarios, UDL developed a systematic approach to the support structure, installation method, cable management, and everyday operation, reducing the burden of installation and use while allowing structural elements such as the stand, cables, and related components to integrate naturally into the surrounding environment.

The product maintains a long-term, low-profile presence within the home, continuously providing support and services while allowing users’ attention to return to everyday life itself.

Designing the Next Generation of Family AI Experience

Nori Family Hub represents UDL’s exploration of next-generation Family AI product experience. Starting from the way AI is used within the home, we further examined the relationship between the product, household members, physical environments, privacy boundaries, and long-term everyday life, translating these considerations into product architecture, interaction design, and industrial design.

From the “photo frame” design concept to the interchangeable frame system; from the acoustic structure integrated within the circular channel to the physical control combining brand identity with privacy management, every design decision responds to the same question: how should technology enter the home, and what role should it take in everyday life?

As AI gradually becomes a foundational capability of products, the focus of smart hardware design is also evolving. Products need to express technological capabilities while responding to human experiences, spatial order, and the boundaries of everyday life.

Nori Family Hub proposes a future-oriented Family AI product experience: keeping complex technology within the product, allowing intelligence to naturally become part of everyday domestic life, and helping household members dedicate more attention to each other.