A digital twin for the person who runs the building and the person who fixes it

My brief arrived as high-level scope: modules, capabilities, the things the engine could do. My role was to translate that into core user flows, detailed interactions and the production interfaces engineering would build against. I was the bridge between what the technology could do and what the people using it needed it to do, which in this case were quite different things.

The risk with a product like this is shipping something powerful that nobody can use. The manager wants a glance. The technician wants depth. They have different contexts, different technical vocabularies and different amounts of time, and the temptation is to build two products and call it a platform.

I kept it as one, and made the building itself the shared object. The manager sees it from above with the problems coloured in. The technician walks into it, room by room, from a phone. Same data, same twin, different distance.

The way facility teams found anomalies before was manual: checking spreadsheets and maintenance logs one by one. In Syyclops the architectural, mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems all layer on the same 3D model, and filters isolate whatever you care about: a water loop, an air-handling unit, one electrical panel. Colour does the rest. A red asset means something needs a look. You see the building’s problems the way you would see a red light on a dashboard, and you drill in from there.

The alternative I rejected was a list-first product with the 3D model as a nice-to-have. Lists are easier to build and easier to scan for one thing. They are terrible at answering “what is wrong right now” across a whole building, which is the manager’s only question.

Facility teams spend a surprising share of the day looking for the right document: cut sheets, operations and maintenance manuals, inspection reports, commissioning notes. I designed the AI search as a place to ask the building a question in plain language and get a direct answer with the source document linked underneath. A five-minute file hunt becomes a five-second answer, and for a technician handling twenty service calls a day that compounds fast.

The rejected alternative was a better document browser. It would have been faster to ship and it would have kept the file hunt exactly as long as it was.

Technicians spend the day walking corridors and opening mechanical closets. They do not sit down with a laptop. So the iOS app is not the desktop product made responsive; it is a different product for the same twin. Scan a room, see its assets, triage what is wrong, create a work order, all from the phone. Indoor air quality and space comfort sit at the top because those are the first things a facility team checks when they walk into a building.

Responsive would have been cheaper, and I argued against it. A field tool that is a cut-down desktop tool fails in exactly the moment it is needed, with one hand, in a dark room, on a bad connection.

A modular design system lives in Figma next to the product: components, colour tokens, type, interaction states and a full icon library. Every primitive is wired to Figma variables, so the handoff to engineering is lossless and nobody guesses a spacing or a colour. The palette comes from the Syyclops brand: deep blue as the quiet canvas that lets data breathe, orange as the one colour that always means “act on this”. That carries across hundreds of screens without losing its clarity.

I worked directly with the product managers, the engineers and the company’s leadership, so that each design decision was tied to a real business goal and a real user need. When a junior designer joined, I moved into reviewing their work, setting direction and making sure the system could scale past me. A design system that only works when its author is in the room is not a system. The goal from the start was that the team could keep going after my contract ended, and they have.

Syyclops launched its first version with end-to-end flows on both web and iOS. The handoff included detailed specs, motion documentation and an interactive prototype engineering could reference during the build. Syyclops deployed it at Flint Hill School (two campuses, more than 350,000 square feet) and at a Hyatt Place hotel in 2023, and ran a Washington DC public-schools pilot at Dunbar High School (300,000 square feet). The design system I built is the foundation for every new feature the team ships.

That last part is the outcome I care about most: not that the screens looked good on launch day, but that the system kept working as the product grew and I was no longer there.