Sonder Design seeks to create beautiful products that delight, surprise and connect with our customers.

Sonder's E-ink keyboard adapts intuitively to designers. No longer do you have to memorize hundreds of application-specific shortcuts or switch between editor keyboards or plastic keyboard overlays. Now you can work faster and smarter to perfect your designs, empowered by infinite possibilities at your fingertips.

Seamlessly switch between any language, application-specific shortcuts or custom icons on your keys. From English to Mandarin, from Adobe Photoshop to Solidworks, from QWERTY to DVORAK. With Sonder, you're only limited by your imagination and not by your static keyboard.

Design Team

Francisco Serra-Martins

Felipe Serra-Martins

Sonder's E-ink keyboard is the inevitable solution to a compelling design sector need. Designers are required to memorise hundreds of application-specific shortcuts, etc. Not only is this inefficient and costly for the sector, it's frankly frustrating. Because every application needs a slightly unique user-interface, a slightly optimised set of keys just for it. Finally, Sonder's world first E-ink keyboard adapts intuitively to designers. Whether for work or play, now millions of designers can create in a radical new way, empowered by infinite possibilities at their fingertips, enriching the profession and inspiring the sector to grow, liberated of the static keyboard.

Sonder is redefining the keyboard of tomorrow. To do this, Sonder has had to totally redesign how, as a user, we approached the keyboard. Therefore, Sonder's R&D team has continued to prototype a creative synthesis of technologies – where design, science and technology intersect right at your fingertips. Similarly to Pebble or Kindle, Sonder integrates a bespoke, 1.4mm thin, glass-substrate, electrophoretic display (EPD) to project the key's display imagery through a transparent key mechanism molded from a styrene acrylonitrile resin. The EPD is supported by a custom-engineered timing-control module to enable partial updates of the key's display imagery.

Dieter Rams' principles for good design inspires our team. Hence why Sonder embraces sustainable design, not engineered obsolescence. Sonder's E-ink keyboard is supported by a timing-control module which enables the EPD to consume less than a micro-amp. Sonder's intelligent power management system conserves battery life too, so when you're not typing, our E-ink keyboard automatically powers down so as to be energy efficient. Yet given our EPD is bistable, the key's display imagery is still displayed without consuming any energy. Sonder has also molded our transparent key mechanism from a recycled styrene acrylonitrile resin so as to preserve the environment.

The keyboard, the principal means in which we interact with computers, has largely not evolved since its inception. Given our world first design, Sonder has submitted the first of three provisional patents, securing our innovative hardware, firmware and manufacturing method. Sonder's solution integrates a single EPD, instead of micro-displays per key which require an individual display device, driver, timing-control module and electronics board. Our design therefore increases Sonder's capability to scale. By using an E-ink display instead of a TFT/LCD/LED device too, Sonder significantly reduces unit cost too, whilst preserving a thin profile, energy efficiency and wireless functionality.

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