Character and AI Assistant Design for a Health Insurer
Why is every AI suddenly wearing ‘handmade’ clothes?
BUCK partnered with Oscar Health to create Oswell, a cel-animated AI companion designed to simplify healthcare interactions. The team developed Oswell’s name, personality, and expressive visual language to convey warmth, trust, and approachability while aligning with Oscar’s brand ethos of simplicity.
Insights
- BUCK’s key bet with Oscar’s “Oswell” is that the best assistants “don’t fake humanity”; instead they stay approachable with a clear point of view—then use warm, handmade cel-animation to make healthcare interactions feel simpler and safer.
- Oscar positioned the product as a “secure, personalized AI front door to their healthcare,” so BUCK designed not just visuals but the full character system: name (Oswell), personality, appearance, and “visual behaviors” aligned to Oscar’s simplicity-first brand.
- The character design was narrowed using explicit trait frameworks (“figurative vs. abstract” and “matter-of-fact vs. feisty”), then translated into an initial suite of six hand-painted expressions meant to map to common conversational moments in the agent.
- Production pragmatism was built into the deliverables: the final expression suite shipped in two versions—high-res with richer brushstrokes/animation for large-scale placements, plus an optimized in-app set—showing how motion language was tuned per context, not just aesthetics.
- The wider trend context is slightly ironic: commentators (citing Elisabeth Goodspeed) argue AI brands are “humanizing” with analogue/craft signals (doodles, pseudo-handwriting) that originally rose as a reaction against AI’s slickness—now used to imply AI is “pleasant” and “human,” even if it’s a crafted imitation of handmade authenticity.
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