Every ceramics studio has a glaze wall. A physical archive of fired test tiles labeled, stacked on shelves, occasionally broken, frequently misread. It’s one of the most important tools in the studio and one of the least organized. You either know your way around it or you don’t, and that knowledge lives almost entirely in your head.
Tiles is my attempt to fix that.
For my MCAD capstone this summer, I’m designing and building Tiles: a mobile app for pottery studios that digitizes the physical glaze tile wall into a searchable, studio-wide archive. Members can browse glaze combinations, document their pieces from greenware to glaze, and contribute to a shared body of knowledge that actually persists and travels with you wherever you work.
Glaze and piece documentation is a roadblock for students, studio members, and instructors alike. The design challenge underneath it. How do you take something tactile, institutional, and inherently physical and turn it into a useful digital tool without stripping out what makes it valuable?
Tiles isn’t a glaze calculator or a recipe database. Those exist. It’s a studio operating system: part archive, part piece tracker, part community layer. The goal is to make the collective knowledge of a studio accessible to everyone in it, from new students to longtime members.
The Project Brief
Before the build phase began, I put together a project brief to define the scope, establish the visual direction, and set a realistic timeline for the 10-week capstone course. It covers the problem, the solution, competitive analysis, early prototype screens, user personas, and a week-by-week roadmap.
You can take a look at it below.
Where Things Stand
The prototype is functional. Core features are in place. A glaze mixer with studio shared tile archives, a piece tracker that logs notes at each stage of making, and a multi-studio membership structure with admin and member roles. A small group of studio ceramicists has already started testing it, and that early feedback is shaping what comes next.
The next phase is about depth. Expanded community features, broader user testing, and tightening the interface and brand through iteration. This blog will document that process as it happens.
More soon!
The entire studio in your pocket. 
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