Sherpa Light

Smart agriculture | IoT lighting system | Mobile UX | CES 2020 Innovation Award Honoree

Designing mobile controls for an award-recognized smart agriculture lighting system.

  • Role: UX/UI Designer and Front-End Developer
  • Platform: Mobile application
  • Scope: UX/UI design, mobile front-end implementation, scheduling and control flows, device feedback, and documentation.

  • Project snapshot

    This page summarizes the project, my role, process, and outcome. Additional visuals and process artifacts will be added over time.

  • Introduction

    Sherpa Light is a commercially available smart agriculture lighting product and CES 2020 Innovation Award honoree. I worked on the mobile experience for configuring and controlling plant-growth lighting conditions, focusing on clarity, feedback, and safe interaction in controlled growing environments.

  • The challenge

    Plant-growth lighting involves timing, intensity, zones, growth stages, and safety considerations. The app needed to give users enough control to operate the system confidently while helping them avoid incorrect settings that could affect plant growth or device behavior.

  • My contribution

    • Designed dashboard, zone control, device configuration, lighting mode, monitoring, and feedback flows.
    • Created scheduling patterns that made time-based lighting behavior easier to understand and adjust.
    • Implemented mobile front-end flows and supported hardware-connected control behavior.
    • Documented design decisions and interaction patterns for engineering and stakeholder alignment.

  • Outcome

    The app made the lighting system easier to configure, control, and demonstrate. It helped translate a technically complex device into a clearer mobile experience for users managing plant-growth environments.

  • Translating biological constraints into control

    This project reflects my ability to translate technical and biological constraints into clear interaction patterns. The interface had to make lighting schedules, manual overrides, device feedback, and hardware behavior understandable without exposing users to unnecessary system complexity.