Hitachi

The Social Distancing Cart is a Hitachi platform for monitoring factory floors — live camera feeds and computer vision that started with COVID-era distancing and grew into broader activity and safety checks across plants. As Senior Product Designer I worked on it with the team, designing it as enterprise software at Hitachi scale: heavy day-to-day tools, under a strict corporate brand, for people who work in factories.

The work ran from new features built from zero (the live 360 sessions, the model marketplace) to adapting and extending old screens — the camera walls, recorded review, and reporting — held together as one clear, consistent system.

Enterprise UX, at Hitachi scale

Designing inside a company this big is a job in itself. The product had to feel unmistakably Hitachi — restrained, corporate, accessible — while still carrying genuinely complex tools: hundreds of cameras across factories and zones, live and recorded video, 360 feeds, sessions, audit trails, and a model marketplace.

• Make a wall of camera feeds scannable, filterable, and calm — not a surveillance blur.
• Support live monitoring, recording, and after-the-fact review in one flow.
• Hold the Hitachi brand and accessibility bar across every surface.

Closer to the customer than the brief

The work wasn't only tickets from product management. In a B2B segment like this the customers and operators are reachable, so I took demos and clickable prototypes straight to them — showing directions, gathering feedback in context, then bringing it back to refine inside the team. I could start those conversations myself, using each demo to get extra feedback from the people who actually run a factory floor before the engineers started building.

The prototypes in those sessions were built with AI tools — fast enough to turn an idea into something interactive for the next demo, so feedback landed on the real interaction rather than a flat screen.

The camera wall

The home surface: every camera in a zone at a glance, filtered by factory, zone, camera, and status. From the grid an operator drops into a single feed full-screen — with a thumbnail wall and a floor-plan minimap to keep their bearings across the plant.

Live 360 sessions

An “activity check” runs as a live session: a pannable 360 feed, participants, and a running comment thread, with one-tap recording. Monitoring becomes collaborative — people review a floor together, in context.

Recorded review — privacy built in

Sessions are recorded for later review and audit, with face and background blur as a first-class option — monitoring people's workplaces responsibly, by design rather than as an afterthought.

Reporting & audit

Everything rolls up into reports — a dense, filterable table of audits and events by factory, zone, cameras, type, and status, that exports to a shareable session report. The clear, professional end of the product.

A marketplace of vision models

The platform is extensible: a marketplace where teams add computer-vision models — object recognition and beyond — to a factory, so a simple monitoring tool can grow as needs change.

What it adds up to

A complex industrial platform — live monitoring, recording, reporting, and an extensible model marketplace — taken from new features through redesigns to feel like one calm, consistent product: on-brand for Hitachi and easy to read for the people who run a factory floor.