As the dust settles on this year’s CES, ÖFY offers a case study in a growing design-led push towards unobtrusive technology, signalling a potential shift in how intelligence is embedded into everyday products.
If you’re not part of the typical tech crowd, CES probably feels a little overwhelming. Screens stack on screens, demos blur into spectacle, and each year brings a fresh wave of devices promising to be faster, smarter, more intelligent than the last.
Once the dust has settled, it’s a little easier to see through the extravagant futurism and focus on products that are both well-designed and actually useful.
This year, one of those products is ÖFY, an early-stage AI wearable by Belgian design and engineering studio Futurewave. At first glance, it feels almost anti-CES, with no screen and no visual theatre. Instead, ÖFY is a discreet, modular audio companion that clips magnetically to clothing, bags, or phones, working hands-free and screen-free to record conversations, transcribe notes, and delegate tasks across digital tools in the background.
Interestingly, it’s not positioning itself as another AI assistant or productivity gadget. Instead, ÖFY’s ambition centres around intelligence that integrates so seamlessly into everyday life that it almost disappears.
Much of the recent AI wearable boom has been driven by feature accumulation, characterised by more sensors, more dashboards, and more things to monitor, tweak, and optimise. Futurewave has taken a deliberately different route, inherent in their design expertise.
“Tech companies build AI wearables by adding features until something ships,” the studio notes. “Design studios are built by subtracting until only the essential remains”.
You can see this clearly from ÖFY’s design, which relies on professional-grade audio capture rather than visual interfaces, translating spoken words into structured notes, populated records and delegated actions without pulling users into another screen-based workflow. The goal, according to Futurewave, is not artificial intelligence that competes for attention, but augmented intelligence that allows people to think, create and work more fluidly.
You could go so far as to label this restraint as radical in a CES landscape dominated by spectacle.
The timing of this launch matters too, as public conversations around AI are increasingly shaped by anxiety. Every day, tech consumers are concerned with surveillance, distraction, data misuse and cognitive overload. Wearables, in particular, sit close to the body and daily routines, raising questions about how much technology should see, hear or influence.
ÖFY’s response is not to deny these concerns but to design around them. The device operates with a privacy-first architecture and supports multiple AI backends, allowing flexibility in how intelligence is processed and deployed. Just as importantly, its lack of a screen removes a familiar source of behavioural nudging which we’ve become so used to. It doesn’t demand you focus or urge you to check and react.
In the context of AI, that calmness becomes a form of trust-building. Perhaps, if technology no longer insists on being seen, it can start to feel less intrusive.
With ÖFY, the research and development are just as interesting as the finished concept. While much new tech is rooted in speculative lifestyle scenarios or imagined future rituals, ÖFY grew out of Futurewave’s long-term research into real professional workflows, particularly among tradespeople, craftspeople, and knowledge workers. Across sectors, the studio observed that highly skilled professionals lose valuable time to documentation, transcription and administrative busywork. Essentially, tasks that add friction without adding value.
ÖFY is designed to absorb those low-value moments by turning spoken interactions into structured outputs without interrupting the work itself. Its purpose isn’t to ‘optimise’ the user, but to protect their time and attention.
Sometimes it’s the tech that addresses the mundane realities of daily work that makes the most difference, not the fancy robot with all the bells and whistles.
Rather than rushing to ship, Futurewave is treating ÖFY as a long-term exploration. Following CES, the studio is launching a phased market validation programme, deploying prototypes with professionals across different industries to test assumptions and refine functionality based on real feedback.
This deliberate pace aligns closely with design-led product thinking, where longevity, adaptability and trust matter as much as novelty.
ÖFY also gestures toward a broader shift in how we might interact with technology in the coming years. As AI becomes more capable, the interface itself becomes the bottleneck. Screens, dashboards and controls risk slowing down systems meant to facilitate fluid human behaviour. By relying on speech, context and background processing, ÖFY hints at a post-interface future where interaction is ambient rather than explicit, and technology responds to human behaviour rather than reshaping it.
As with any kind of innovation, the future isn’t without risk. Invisible systems demand careful governance, transparency, and ethical design, but they also offer a way out of the attention-economy logic that has dominated consumer tech for the past decade.
