QUEUE

Two things go wrong in a salon and they are the same thing. Clients decide on a haircut from a photograph of somebody else's head, and they do it in the chair while the shop backs up behind them.

Queue is a kiosk that moves the decision into the waiting time: it maps your face, renders styles onto you live, answers questions out loud, and hands a chosen look to your stylist before you sit down.

Five conversations gave us the failure in people's own words. A software engineer described leaving with blunt bangs that clashed with their face shape and called it a disaster.

A stylist described the same gap from the other side of the chair: clients arrive with expectations built from pictures, and somebody has to bridge fantasy and reality before any cutting starts. A short survey shared online put numbers behind them. Seventy-eight percent could not judge what suited their face shape; sixty percent could not picture the outcome at all.

We designed this for a phone first, and user and faculty feedback took it apart. A phone screen is the wrong size for judging a haircut, and an app asks for a download at the exact moment someone is walking through a door.

One interviewee had already told us they did not trust technology much and asked whether an app would be usable by someone who is not tech-savvy. We were quietly excluding the person who needed the visualisation most. The deeper problem was timing: an app used at home does nothing for the queue.

The camera measures. A head scan returns structure, proportion, texture and skin condition as an overview rather than a verdict, because a system that tells someone their face is the wrong shape has failed at its only real task.

Touch browses: style filmstrips, a colour row from blonde to blue-black, and a compare view holding two options side by side. Voice asks, and it is the entry point for anyone who would never have found a filter menu.

The kiosk changes the shape of the visit. Time that produced nothing now produces a decision, and the stylist meets a client who has already narrowed the field instead of one holding a photograph and a hope.

Both people end up looking at the same image, which is where real expertise finally has room to work rather than being spent on translation.

A kiosk is not a phone. The client is looking at it from a seat and the stylist is looking at it over their shoulder, so every size decision was made at arm's length rather than at reading distance.

The palette is deliberately three values: coral for anything you can act on, white for the surface, black for the type. Nothing else earns a colour, which means the one coral element on a screen is always the thing to touch. It also survives the room, since salon lighting is warm and bright and washes out anything subtler.