My first true industrial design project — and the first time I designed with user-centered principles, start to finish.
Surteks manufactures oil-change and engine-flush equipment used in car service centers across Turkey. They came to me wanting a more user-friendly version of their existing tool — and that request told me something important: a company making deeply technical, unglamorous service equipment cared enough about the people using it every day to bring in industrial design.
This became MYST Pro, designed entirely from scratch as the successor to MYST One — Surteks's original, metal-bodied unit that had already logged over 750,000 applications across five years in the field. This was also the first project where I built the process around user-centered design principles from the start.
MYST One's metal body had served its purpose, but metal imposes real limits on form — every curve costs more, every ergonomic improvement fights the material. Moving to molded plastic for MYST Pro removed that ceiling entirely, opening up surfaces I simply couldn't have shaped in sheet metal.
The brief was about the technician's actual workday: how the unit moves around a bay, how it gets cleaned between jobs, where tools and parts go while a job is in progress. Every surface decision traced back to one of those real, observed moments.
Nobody had asked what this machine felt like to use all day. I started there.
Idea
This wasn't a request to make the machine look better — it was a request to make a technician's full workday with it easier. The idea was to treat the exterior as a tool in its own right, not a shell wrapped around the engineering inside.
Form
Molded plastic let me design surfaces MYST One's metal body never could: a body shaped specifically for ease of handling, wheels designed for smooth maneuvering around a crowded service bay, and screen and gauge housings consolidated into a single protected zone instead of scattered exposed components.
Rear handles were added specifically for maneuverability, and a hose-hanging system with dedicated storage solved a problem every technician deals with but no version of the product had addressed before.
Function
The new plastic surfaces are genuinely easier to clean — a real factor in a service bay environment where oil and grime are constant. A dedicated tray area was integrated into the design specifically for the technician's tools, keeping them within reach instead of scattered across a workbench.
Differentiation
MYST One proved the category could be trusted at scale — 750,000 applications is not a small track record. MYST Pro had to prove the same equipment could also be designed around the person operating it, without sacrificing the durability that made the original viable in daily service use.
Impact
MYST Pro became Surteks's next-generation flush unit, built on the trust MYST One had already earned across years of service center use — now paired with a body genuinely designed around how technicians work, not just what the machine needed to do.
I'd designed for aesthetics before, but MYST Pro was my first project combining real aesthetic and technical design together, and the first time I deliberately structured my process around user-centered design rather than working from intuition alone. Every decision — the handle placement, the hose storage, the tray for tools — came from watching how a technician actually moves through a job, not from assuming I already knew.
What I'm proud of here is simple: a company whose product had nothing to do with consumer aesthetics still believed design mattered enough to invest in it. That trust is what made this my real first step into industrial design as a practice, not just a skill.
MYST Pro carries forward the reliability MYST One built over 750,000 applications, now in a body designed specifically around the technicians who use it every day — my first complete industrial design project, and the first built entirely on user-centered principles.