Chaewon Lee started designing TUNO by watching, not sketching — tracing the hand movements of three working DJs across a CDJ deck until the paths themselves revealed the shape the device needed to take. The resulting wearable DJ controller, developed through the Samsung Design Membership program, condenses two full decks of professional equipment into a ring roughly the size of a CD, small enough to hold like a steering wheel and complete enough to mix, scratch, and beat-match without a booth. The donut shape is not styling. It is the literal outline of how DJs already move.
The research came before the form, and that order matters. Lee, who works as both an industrial designer and a DJ, recorded three professional sets on standard CDJ (RX-3) hardware and overlaid the recorded movement paths in color to see what patterns emerged. Two findings drove everything downstream: the two decks showed near-perfect symmetry between a DJ’s hands, and the movements themselves traced circular paths rather than the straight lines a rectangular mixer assumes. TUNO’s ring form is that data, built into plastic.
A single spring-loaded button on top handles the job a full jog wheel usually does in this ring-shaped DJ controller. Spinning it delivers the tactile resistance DJs rely on for beat-matching, compressed into one point of contact instead of a spinning twelve-inch platter. Around it, a click wheel and scroll button take over the six separate knobs a conventional CDJ setup requires — the click wheel selects high, mid, or low frequencies, the scroll adjusts their levels — collapsing a wall of controls into two gestures a thumb can reach without looking down.
Wireless earbuds are built into the system, not bundled alongside it. They activate the moment they’re worn, connecting directly to a paired music app, and a motion sensor inside tracks head position: tilting toward one side monitors that deck’s track in isolation, echoing the one-ear-off habit professional DJs already use with standard headphones. The earbuds also support a detachable strap port for wired connection, so the wireless setup isn’t the only option if latency becomes a concern mid-set.
Two more gestures extend the interaction past the ring itself, part of what makes this portable DJ device feel complete rather than stripped down. Flipping the device switches to the next track; shaking it triggers a recommendation for a new song at a matching BPM. Neither move requires touching a specific button, which is the point — TUNO treats gesture as an interface layer sitting on top of the click-wheel controls, not a replacement for them, so a DJ already fluent in CDJ logic loses no functionality by picking it up.
Portability was the brief from the start, not a constraint discovered midway through, and it shows in how this wearable DJ controller compares to standard gear. Where a CDJ setup demands a booth, a laptop, and enough table space for two full decks, TUNO connects to any music app over Bluetooth and fits in a bag. Lee describes the intended use less like professional performance gear and more like a sketchbook — something that captures a musical idea the moment it surfaces, whether that’s on a commute or in a kitchen, rather than waiting for stage conditions to justify the setup.
A lighting UI gives the device its only screen-adjacent feedback, showing beat flow in real time without requiring a display to read. That choice keeps TUNO legible at a glance in low-light performance conditions, the same environments the source research was gathered in, while avoiding the added bulk a full screen would introduce to an object built to fit in one hand.
This isn’t the first object to fold a specialist gesture into something worn rather than operated at a distance, a design instinct Connor Grady tested from a different angle with IRIS, folding a dedicated interface into hardware people already live alongside. Konel’s Pulse Pack takes a comparable approach from the opposite direction, translating a bodily rhythm — the wearer’s own heartbeat — into a physical pulse felt against the back, rather than a performer’s gesture translated outward into control. Both projects treat the body’s own rhythm as the design brief rather than an obstacle to accommodate.
TUNO remains a concept, refined through clay modeling and 3D scanning rather than shipped as hardware, and Lee has been transparent that it hasn’t cleared the distance between a design-week prototype and a durable, mass-producible object. What the project does resolve, regardless of whether it reaches production, is a genuine design question: whether professional-grade control density can survive being folded into something small enough to forget you’re holding it. On that question, TUNO’s ring already reads as an answer, not a proposal.