“He speaks with working prototypes, not with slides.”
“Picture the best person you know at solving hard software/hardware problems fast. Now rip that picture up and replace it with Datta because this guy gets things done.”
“If I could only hire one designer for strategy, software, hardware and aesthetics on our really challenging complex projects, the choice would immediately and without a doubt be Saurabh Datta.”
“Saurabh is one of the most impressive designer, technologist, maker, thinker I have ever met, anywhere in the world.”
“He thinks by doing and can do, well, pretty much anything - interaction, hardware, dev... He embodies the Creative Technologist role at its deepest.”
Services
Concept development
A half-formed idea becomes a scoped, defensible concept: framing, feasibility, and the demonstration narrative that carries it through your organization.
Interaction design / HMI + HRI
Behavior and interface for novel hardware: vehicles, robots, appliances; defined on paper, proven on the device.
Rapid prototyping
Working prototypes across hardware, software and AI, end to end by one person, in weeks not quarters. The flagship: a fixed-price concept sprint, raw brief to working proof of concept in 2-4 weeks.
Prototype to small series
Enclosures, mechanisms and module-first electronics honest about manufacture: parametric CAD, SLA and CNC, from one-off to small batch.
On-device + local AI
TinyML to self-hosted generative stacks: models that run where the product lives: private, offline, demonstrable.
Enablement + R&D culture
Workshops and embedded residencies that leave your team running: physical computing, AI tooling, prototype-first practice.
Case studies (Highlights)
2024 / Publicis Groupe / Smart bottle cap
Every conventional supplier had declined the timeline as too risky. Scoped at 14 weeks, delivered in ~11, alone: on-device cry classification at 87% on six cry types, parametric cap design, bilingual interface, CI/CD for client firmware updates.
Details →2024-2025 / Volkswagen Group / The VW thread
Two engagements, two firms, one relationship. At Prophet: the Gen.Urban AI player, built and integrated in 3.5 months, still running the vehicle's demos years later. At zigzag: the AI-augmented cockpit, a self-hosted generative stack across a seating buck and a real vehicle, internal Innovation Award, patent applications.
2024 / Agile Robots / Humanoid interaction
Nine weeks defining HRI standards the client says laid the UX foundation for Agile ONE, their first market-ready humanoid. The Wizard-of-Oz ring-eye rig built during the engagement matured into the open-source tool ring_eye_sim.
Details →2018-2022 / Volkswagen Group Innovation / The R&D era
Before consulting: I built and led the Creative Technology R&D division at VW Group Innovation's Future Center Asia: patent-filed interaction hardware, shape-changing surfaces, user-trainable gesture recognition on edge ML, and the concept, creative direction, and HMI architecture of the Gen.Urban program.
Background →Clients
Volkswagen Group R&D, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Siemens, IKEA, UBS, Canonical, Electrolux, Zebra, BSH, HENSHOLDT, SAIC, Chery, Meizu, Mobvoi and a few more
Directly and through frog, Prophet, VW Group Innovation and zigzag.
About
I work across interaction design, industrial design, electronics, firmware and AI, with local, on-device models as my focus, and I ship mostly alone: from half-formed idea to working hardware. Over the past decade I've built and led creative-technology and R&D teams at frog, Prophet, and VW Group Innovation's Future Center Asia. Today I'm at zigzag in Berlin, leading emerging-tech work with 💙 for local AI and AI-plus-design endeavors.
Datta+Baum, the product studio I run with Benjamin Baum, makes small-run physical objects. My art practice, rooted in the collective automato.farm, has shown at the Vitra Design Museum, ZKM and the Vienna Biennale. I teach occasionally, Bauhaus Weimar and CIID recently, to keep the practice honest.
Seven years in China gave all of it a cross-regional spine: building things that sit between disciplines and making them real.
Contact
hi@dattasaurabh.comFull portfolio and Rate Card available on request.