Inside the company building America's first mail-order servant robot

Silicon Valley startup 1X Technologies will start shipping its Neo humanoid robots into people's homes this year. Dezeen's Ellen Eberhardt was given an exclusive look behind the scenes where designers are turning the stuff of science fiction into reality.

"There's this really interesting dialogue around whether this is skin or clothing," 1X Technologies (1X) designer Danny Chambers said, examining the 3D-knitted bodysuit of a Neo robot lying lifelessly on a plywood desk, Frankenstein-style.

"We're really trying to make it feel safe in your house," Chambers continued. "More like a couch than a refrigerator, for example. Utilising our knowledge of fabrics, textiles, knits and softer materials, that's been pretty helpful."

Chambers is part of a small, tight-knit design team at 1X. Until recently, he was living in Oregon and running his own footwear design studio, having previously worked at Nike.

On a fateful day, he got a call from 1X's VP of product and design, Dar Sleeper – and the next thing he knew, he was relocating to Palo Alto to help build out the visual identity of the Neo Home Robot.

The team, which includes head of architecture B Armstrong and Chambers' studio partner, James Gall,  was all hand-recruited this way by Sleeper, whose own CV includes projects with Tesla and Yeezy.

"Can you make this cool?"

Sleeper himself was hired a little over two years ago by Bernt Børnich, who established 1X in Norway in 2014.

The founder was looking for a design evolution from Neo's predecessor, Eve, an industrial semi-humanoid robot released by Børnich in 2022 which rolls around factory floors on a set of wheels.

"His prompt was: can you make this cool?" Sleeper told Dezeen. "Bernt's got all this very beautiful wood design taste, but he didn't know how to infuse that in the brand. He brought me in as the first non-engineering hire."

"I broke down the problem and asked, all right, if we want to connect this world of technology to normal, everyday humans, what is that going to look like? And then we redesigned the robot from the ground up in, like, the first six weeks I was there."

Drawing inspiration from the likes of Jasper Morrison, Naoto Fukasawa and Tadao Ando, the team considered everything from the depths of Neo's eye sockets to the width of its shoulders, aiming to create a robot that was non-intimidating but still robust enough to complete tasks around the house.

Gender and the robot's "sexiness" also had to be contemplated, with the team ultimately landing on the decision to make Neo genderless.

"A body envelope really quickly either gets sexualized or scary," explained Sleeper. "If the shoulders are too broad, you feel threatened. If the abdominals are too tapered, it gets a little too sexy."

"Our goal is to make it neutral top to bottom, and then, if anything, make it a little cartoonish."

Neo is markedly different in appearance from its peers, such as Tesla's Optimus, LG's CLOiD or the wave of humanoid robots birthed in China.

The five-foot-six robot is clothed in a one-piece 3D-knit suit, made on Japanese Shima Seiki machines, with round beady eyes and oval "ears" that light up when listening for commands.

It comes in three colourways ranging from soft taupe to muted brown, chosen to blend into the home environment.

"The three colours we have, we found fit in any home possible. So any home has a colour match," said Sleeper.

In a modestly sized, plywood-lined design studio abutting the company HQ, the team is still perfecting Neo, tweaking elements such as its boot and a charging cord that snaps onto its hip.

Dezeen is given a meandering tour of the 1X facility, passing by disembodied robot hands, humming computer bays and staff eating lunch.

At one point, we encounter Børnich hunched over a laptop, face semi-concealed by a baseball cap, but Sleeper gives him a wide berth.

"He like, built those in a barn," Sleeper said of actuators that grant Eve and Neo the power of movement.

"It's pretty gnarly. He was – I mean he still is – super childish. And he just asked himself the super interesting question of, why don't we live in a world full of humanoid robots?"

"It'll walk off and introduce itself"

Børnich and 1X are in the middle of a huge gamble to design, manufacture and ship the $20,000 Neo model to households across the US. It plans to begin deliveries sometime this year after launching the product in 2025 via glossy ads.

The process is happening at a rapid pace. Børnich relocated the company from Norway to California just two years ago, shipping across industrial 3D printers.

The company now employs around 600 people across two main buildings.

Driving the haste is the AI race. After Eve's development, Børnich decided to pivot 1X's focus from industrial environments to households, which are considered highly fertile ground for training AI models thanks to the abundance of diverse and human-facing tasks.

"Everybody that's been in the AI space knows data diversity is kind of everything," Sleeper said. "You need the most diverse set of data possible to create the most generalised models."

For now, Neo is only partly autonomous, still needing to be controlled via a teleoperated VR headset for most tasks, and the first owners will be helping to train its AI – a blend of OpenAI models and 1X's own text-to-speech model.

Customers country-wide have already put their orders in for Neo, and are now patiently awaiting its arrival.

The robot will be delivered crouched in a box, standing up once it's opened.

"Then it'll walk off and introduce itself, and then get a bunch of information and ask you your name and all that," said Sleeper.

Mostly, according to Sleeper, customers are tech-enthusiastic, dual-income-no-kid millennials – but some have a specific need for household assistance.

"There's a whole slew of really heartfelt and touching DMs we get saying, 'I have a blind dad who I need to pay for support for every day'," he said.

"While these are the reasons why we're doing it – we want to be able to provide help – those are use-cases that will take a little bit more time to develop."

Of course, this also hints at some of the ethical considerations around home servant robots.

Madeline Gannon, an architectural and computational designer focused on interactions between robots and humans, has reservations.

"I have issues with domestic robotics and humanoid robots in the home," she told Dezeen.

"Basically, my general take is that people do not want a robot to do their dishes in the house, they want clean dishes. People do not want a robot to fold their laundry in the house, they want folded laundry. And there's so many ways to go about that."

"A lot of the solutions looking for a problem are to take over tasks that are generally done by female labour or immigrant labour."

However, she voices support for Neo's "thoughtful" design.

"What I appreciate about Neo and 1X is that they seem to have design as a core offering from the jump, and that's new," she said. "It never comes into the conversation for hardware companies."

"I'm really jazzed that design is having a more distinctive voice in this space. I so want to claim this space for designers – I don't want to just leave it up to the engineers and the business people."

For his part, Sleeper is adamant that 1X takes a more ethical approach than many of its competitors.

"If you look at all these other tech companies, they're kind of forcing us into living in a tech world," he said. "We think the world looks really good as it is."

"From a philosophy standpoint, we want tech that lets us do more things we love, like hang out with our family and enjoy our day. We don't want tech that makes us consumed in the tech world."

In 1X's factory building a drive away from the main HQ, the company's vision is exemplified in the form of a giant, nine-metre-high wall mural.

It depicts a Neo carrying a grocery bag, trailing closely behind an easy, breezy family as they walk towards a futuristic city tucked into a mountain range.

In a sign of the breakneck growth at 1X, the company settled into its current location less than a year ago but is already in the process of relocating its entire operation to a former biopharmaceutical factory nearby.

Sleeper and Armstrong are working on cladding the interior in planes of Pacific Northwest wood, and strategically blocking windows to prevent spying by Chinese drones.

"Dar and I planned this out in about nine hours on a flight to Norway," said Armstrong, who serves as the studio's resident design-build expert.

His background in set and production design has made him numb in the face of impossible deadlines – an asset in the rapidly expanding world of 1X.

As we walk through the sprawling complex in the midst of construction, they wave at a large open space that will become 1X's new design studio, which will be elevated on a stage.

The area will be clad in wooden casework and contain "movable stage vignettes" of residential spaces, such as living room furniture on castors, which will be used to showcase Neo's capabilities.

"If you're gonna stand on the studio stage, you'll do the best work of your life," Sleeper enthused. "You're performing."

Elsewhere in the complex, they plan to ship in and plant 12-metre-tall Douglas fir trees to create a forest in the campus courtyard.

At the very centre, employees will be able to stargaze atop a grassy knoll. In the lobby, a Neo will greet you, while another Neo barista will make you a cup of coffee.

The photography is courtesy of 1X unless otherwise stated.

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