The Cosmonaut: A Minimal, Wide-Grip Stylus

A few months ago, right after the Glif Kickstarter campaign ended, I wrote a blog post about how most iPad styluses on the market today follow an incorrect cognitive mapping, in that they try to resemble a pen. The right shape to mimic — to match the low fidelity nature of capacitive touch screens — is a dry erase marker. I of course didn’t know it at the time, but this was the beginning of Studio Neat’s second product.

Tom and I have been researching, prototyping, and designing for the past few months (in synchrony with Glif work) and have come up with a solution that we think is pretty great. And now, once again, we are calling on Kickstarter to help make this idea a reality.

We had some hesitation about using Kickstarter again. We were worried that people would question our motives. Considering how overfunded our first campaign was, didn’t we have enough leftover for other projects? Our reasoning for returning to Kickstarter is two-fold. One, $50k is a ton of money to risk, no matter how much capital you have. And two, Tom and I are intentionally staying small, and continuing to operate as a two man operation. We see Kickstarter as the perfect tool for guys like us, to test out ideas we think may have legs. Maybe in the future if we decide to expand and grow this will no longer be needed, but for now, it just works too well to not use, in large part because of the amazing people that are willing to support our projects.

We also saw this as an opportunity to try something different. For this project, we are instituting a “pay-as-you-wish” system (a la Radiohead). This is the first we have heard of this being done for a physical, tangible product. Basically, you can pay any amount you feel this stylus is worth to you, but the pledge goal ($50,000) and pledge limit (only 3000 slots) will keep things in check, and hopefully create an interesting tension.

So, after receiving encouragement from the Kickstarter staff, we present: The Cosmonaut.

(View on Vimeo).