GEORGE SKINDILIAS
- AirPods, Misused
- Seeing More
- Sketchy Projects
- DemeDesign Studio
- WorkWork

About Me

Hi, I’m George,
I like making things that start as questions and make you look twice.

I move between sketching, industrial design, code, and physical and digital prototyping to explore new ways of interacting.

Check it out

AirPods, misused.


They were built to track your head so sound could stay fixed in space. But that's a 6-DOF motion core sitting in millions of ears, and it doesn't have to stay there. Worn on your head, held in your hand, taped inside a toy, or fused to another device, the same sensor becomes an input nobody designed it to be. An ongoing exploration.


The Racer
THE input had left my body entirely.
And it still worked.

It came last. Everything below is how I got here.




Index: The Racer · On Your Head · In Your Hand · In an Object · The Wand · The System · The Unlock


On Your Head

Every experience starts the same way: the AirPods worn, your head as the controller.

Sky Drifter, fly and shoot. Head banks the plane, the volume rocker is the throttle, the stem fires.





In Your Hand

Take the AirPods out of your ear and nothing breaks. The sensor reads the same, now driven by your hand.

Shape Drop is a pick-and-place puzzle. Move the cursor, press the stem to grab, press again to drop into the matching slot, scored on speed.

Sky Hop is an endless hopper. A slight tilt steers; the stem jumps. Plays equally from your head or your palm.







In an Object
A 3D drift racer with AI rivals, tire smoke, a rear-grip slip model with live drift angle and combo scoring. Steer by turning your head, gas on the volume rocker, handbrake on the stem.

Then I taped over the sensor, dropped the AirPod into a toy convertible, and drove the car by turning the car. 

The sensor doesn't need a body at all. Embed it, and the object becomes the controller.

The drift racer, driven from a toy car. Sky Drifter, can be a toy plane and flown by banking the plane in your hand. Same sensor, a different vessel each time.




The Wand

The last step: fuse the AirPods to another device! 

I taped an AirPod Pro to the tail of an Apple Pencil Pro and pointed it like a laser. The AirPod tracks where the pencil aims, and the Pencil's own double-tap starts and stops the ink.


TWO devices, neither doing its job


The AirPod is the nib, the Pencil is the trigger. Together they draw flowing letterforms in the air, on no surface at all. The least visually showy experiment here, and the one I'm proudest of.






The System

The two channels never merge into one signal; they stay separate all the way down, which is why the same pipeline drives a drift racer, an air-writing tool and an FM orchestra without branching earlier.




AirPods Pro · Apple Pencil Pro · Swift Playgrounds on iPad


The UnlockAI quickly changed what I could make.

Not because I outsourced the thinking, but because I outsourced the syntax.

I'm an industrial designer. I'd never written a line of code. Without AI, I could have learned it, like I learn any new tool. But getting far enough to build, debug, and iterate in a new language would have taken a long time before I could even get to the ideas I wanted to test.

Instead, I could ask a design question, get something running, break it, ask what if, and prototype the next version on my iPad in Swift Playgrounds. The gap between an idea and experiencing it became dramatically shorter.

The hardware is already in everyone's hands. The barrier was never the device, it was knowing enough software to push it somewhere new. That barrier is lower now. If one designer can go from an idea to a working prototype in a few weeks, maybe the bottleneck was never imagination. It was access.