Project Frame
The shared brief for Shaping the Future. What this project is, why it exists, and what we're trying to accomplish. Read this first.
What kind of project is this?
This is a consumer-hardware project. We are designing and bringing to market a physical product, a better everyday toaster, and using this workspace to run the whole effort in the open: research, design debates, planning, and the sources that back every decision.
It is a collaborative case, not a solo build. People join, weigh in on the questions that matter, and the project moves as the team converges. Leo watches the whole thing and surfaces the next useful step.
What problem are we trying to solve?
Toasters have barely changed in decades. They burn one slice while under-toasting the next, the settings are guesswork, and the good-looking ones are expensive while the affordable ones look like appliances from a rental unit.
We want to settle what a genuinely better toaster is, even toasting, controls people trust, and a form that earns a spot on the counter, and prove there is real demand for it before we commit to tooling.
What do we want to accomplish here?
Reach a shared, evidence-backed answer to three things: who this is for, what it must do, and whether the numbers work. Each of those lives in the workspace. The market read, the design direction, and the execution plan, and the Frame is the brief that ties them together.
Concretely, by the end of this phase we want a validated design direction, a demand signal we believe, and a plan with a credible path to a first production run.
How do we know when we're done?
We are done framing when the team can state the pitch in one paragraph without argument, the top open questions have owners, and the summary reads as a decision rather than a debate.
From there the project graduates from framing into build. The plan takes over and the Frame becomes the reference we check ourselves against.
How should the team use this page?
Treat this as the source of truth for intent. If a decision elsewhere in the project seems to drift from what's written here, that's a signal to either change the decision or update the Frame, deliberately, together.
New collaborators should read this first. It's the fastest way to understand what we're doing and where they can help.