The design process started with the context definition: a hypothetical future Venice. We imagined a Venice destroyed in order to avoid a worldwide contamination by a new plague and rebuilt as the new European financial capital. Notion of time became our starting point. We tried to underline a problem that affects our days and which was shown in extreme in our scenario: lack of time. Our users wasted time doing nothing but work , doing something they are forced to do. Our first aim was create an application able to re-establish the right relationship between quantity and quality on the time balance.
first sketches scenario
In the next phase, project focusing, we shaped two ideas whose purpose was to suggest potential actions that, once done, allow users to compare the quality of the time spent working and the one spent experiencing the suggestion given by the service.
project focusing (PDF | 1,9 MB)
“Get time” (or “get a great time”) was the aim of our GrEATIME : anapplication, for a mobile device, that tried to give the chance of stopping the frenetic rhythm of the time, by a graphic solution. On the screen the speed of time was performed by a point which moved quickly, drawing a tangled wake: a kind of visual flow of time. Pressing an icon on the screen, that we imagined as a play/pause command (like that on a common remote control), the point should be stopped on its way. This tried to be the symbolic representation of a break in the compulsive and stressful routine of our scenario: pushing play/stop on the GrEATIME screen the users could play/stop their lives.
sketches GrEATIME interface
Frankenstime was another step on the design development that imagined the service as a solution for the “time illness” that affected the hypothetical Venice users. It tried to the perform the accelerated and insane flow of time using the metaphor of heartbeat and pills. To slow down the insane rhythm of the users heartbeat, shown graphically on the screen, Frankenstime gave to the user a pill, chosen randomly from a blister, that suggested something relaxing to do, see or hear, trying, in that way, to re-establish the right heartbeat rhythm. When the user gets a pill, he or she gets better.
sketches Frankenstime interface
design development ( PDF | 3,6 MB)
At the last phase, through brainstorming, we found an approriate metaphor for our service: Kyo. Kyo (that in Japanese means “now” or “quiet”) uses the metaphor of origami to represent notions fundamental to our concept: the complexity of the origami’s shape, that hides the simplicity of a paper square from which that complexity born, it’s a meaning for the outside complexity of our users and their inner simplicity, for istance . Also, the minimal and clear Oriental enviroment, the mood of Kyo, offers us the chance of giving a sense of tranquillity and relaxation even in the graphic field and at the same time, lets us work further on those details, such as the pattern and the paper shapes, that are the protagonists, with the animation, of the Kyo service.
Early studies interface
Early studies patterns
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