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SICCA · Agri Tech · 2023

The Tech Worked. The Box Didn't.

SICCA builds wireless smart irrigation that automates farm watering across India. The electronics were solid. The enclosures were generic third-party boxes: slow to assemble, damaged in transit, hard to install, and mute to the farmer standing in front of them. I led the redesign of the main controller, the Rubel, from the PCB outward.

My Role

Led UX & Product Design

Experience Designer

Timeline

2023

Methods

Contextual inquiry · Task-process analysis · Pugh matrix

Team

UX & Product Design (me) · SICCA's tech team

Experience Designer (me) · clinical, hospitality, ops, marketing, and tech team

01 · Context

Four Boxes, One Redesign

The system shipped in four variants, Ruble, Franc, Lira, and Euro, all in off-the-shelf enclosures never designed for the places they ended up. Assembly ate time, components arrived damaged, dealers struggled through installation, and farmers had no intuitive way to read the thing watering their fields. We studied all four. The redesign focused where it mattered most: the main controller.

02 · Front Stage

Two Studies in the Field

Two people meet this product: the dealer who installs it and the farmer who lives with it. I ran contextual inquiries at active installation sites, tracing assembly, installation, and maintenance as they actually happen rather than as the manual claims. Then a second study with farmers on visual aesthetics and price point, and the insight that shaped the form came from there: farmers read equipment the way they read tractors. A tractor is a status symbol, and its visual language, what it is allowed to look like, what strength it signals, set the rules for what this controller should look like standing in their field.

03 · Backstage

Mapping the Inside First

Before any form existed, the system architecture: electronics, PCB configurations, internal component relationships, wiring dependencies. Then the competitive landscape, synthesised with the field research into a structured design brief, prioritised MoSCoW-style so the tech team and I argued from the same sheet.

04 · The Moment of Truth

Inside-Out, Not Outside-In

The easy version was to style a better box around the existing guts. We didn't. The internal layout was the problem, so the redesign started with PCB reconfigurations, worked out with the tech team before any external form began. Then the outside, built to the field's rules: extensive visual prototyping of the enclosure, the tractor language carried into form and finish, 10+ concepts narrowed through a Pugh matrix.

V3 Proto

V3 Prototype

05 · Outcomes

1 Controller

the Rubel, redesigned inside out

10+ Concepts

narrowed via Pugh matrix

1 Enclosure

handed over production-ready

06 · Reflection

The biggest design move on this project was not a design move. Reconfiguring the PCB with the tech team unlocked every enclosure decision that followed: form negotiated with the electronics, not applied after them.

I handed over before prototype testing, so I never saw my assumptions meet the field. That part still itches.

Owned: field research · system mapping · design brief · visual prototyping · enclosure concept direction

Worked with: SICCA's tech team · dealers and farmers on site

Didn't own: the irrigation technology · manufacturing · prototype testing

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The Tech Worked. The Box Didn't.