STITCH dashboard on a graphite laptop. Portfolio presentation image.
Ankit Kortikar · Product design case study · Pineapple Spark 2026 innovation challenge
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Explore the working product behind this case study. Start with the workspace overview, open a brief, and explore how requirements, missing inputs and updates come together.
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Creative work rarely arrives as a complete brief. A request is followed by a new size, revised copy, an attachment and a changed deadline. Someone still has to work out which instructions apply.
STITCH explores how that work could become easier. It brings the requirements, changes, missing inputs and people associated with an email conversation into a structured creative workspace. A designer can inspect the source, correct a field and decide what to do next.
The question behind the project: How might we help designers recover the current state of a creative request without repeatedly reconstructing the conversation?
| Area | Scope |
|---|---|
| Primary audience | Visual Communication designers handling requests across business teams |
| Research completed | Interviews with visual designers and other designers |
| Work documented | Problem framing, workflow synthesis, product strategy, interface design and interaction prototyping |
| Current stage | Deployed web app and interactive Figma prototype; case-study screens use illustrative data |
| Research documentation | Participant-level notes, recruitment details and interview dates are not yet included in this draft |
| Impact status | Pilot outcomes have not been measured; success measures are proposed |
Explore the interactive prototype
I interviewed visual designers and other designers about this problem. The accompanying project synthesis describes a workflow in which requirements, deadlines, attachments and approvals are distributed across messages, spreadsheets and memory.
The designer has to connect those fragments before they can make a useful design decision. Finding a message is only one part of the job. They also need to establish whether it is current, whether it changes earlier instructions and whether a missing input prevents work from starting.
The project deck groups the problem into eight themes: fragmented briefs, changing instructions, ambiguous deadlines, hidden dependencies, stakeholder coordination, manual tracking, repeated context recovery and follow-up effort. These are the documented problem themes for this case study. Their frequency across interview participants has not yet been established from the materials available here.
Working synthesis: the opportunity sits between receiving a request and being ready to work on it.
| Moment | What the designer needs to establish | Where uncertainty appears |
|---|---|---|
| A request arrives | What is being requested, and who owns it? | The initial email may be incomplete |
| Replies accumulate | What is the latest requirement? | New instructions may replace earlier ones |
| Work is planned | Is there a usable deadline? | A date, relative phrase or approval dependency may be unclear |
| Production starts | Do I have the copy, dimensions and files? | An attachment may be a reference rather than an editable asset |
| Work pauses | What am I waiting for, and from whom? | A generic status hides the specific dependency |
| Someone follows up | What changed, and what should I do next? | The designer has to recover the context again |
This map is a synthesis of the project material, not a record of a single observed session. It makes the points of uncertainty explicit and provides a structure for further research.