Interview about Ttmm-s for Fitbit Versa App, winner of the A' Interface, Interaction and User Experience Design Award 2020
Ttmm-s for Fitbit Versa app offers collection of clock faces, equipped with the weather feature, in a monthly subscription plan. The app presents clock faces in four categories: the Analogs, the Digitals, the Abstract and the Once. App has a clear view of a single clock face design together with all necessary informations on how to operate a given clock face. Clock faces have two extra views: the weather condition and the air quality view and special weather alerts. Alerts allow to be prepared for unforeseen weather conditions resulting from climate change on our planet.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design Details5 years ago, I designed a time visualization called FEELTTMM for the Pebble Time smartwatch. It was a combination of large time digits combined with a single color that represented the perceived air temperature. Blue for frost, green for cold, yellow for warmth, red for heat, and burgundy for heat. This very simple solution dictated to the recipients how to read the temperature of Time. The idea of this single project was the seed for the entire TTMM-S for Fitbit collection. According to climate.org on my birthday, the average global temperature rose by 1.18 degrees Celsius. It's getting hot - right?
This is an extremely important question - thank you. The mentioned film productions alarmingly aim at the possibility of a catastrophic future of our World. They are an inspiration as a WARNING that the "future" is already TODAY (we are watching it) and if we do not take care of it, TOMORROW may not be our space-time. The film works with images, the music with melody and I combined clear ALARMS with an abstract (not of this earth - not of this era) visualization of time. The combination of modern (future) style of TTMM time visualization (e.g. DOMINUS) with an alarm about e.g. tsunami or high level of UV radiation or polluted air overthrows our illusory support in technology, they can confuse the recipient and I hope bring reflection on the state of the Earth's ecosystem and show that we live in the FUTURE. But I do not know if the recipients or design critics have such a sophisticated reflection on TTMM projects.
It was an experiment. I didn't achieve subscription success (80 subscribers - they must be true TTMM fans - Thank You All) or return on the project. There could be many reasons for this: lack of advertising, high price compared to free competition and lack of a large enough audience appreciating the design and benefits that the app brought.
Detailed information about PM10 and PM25 particles is useful and sometimes crucial for people struggling with respiratory diseases and allergies. They can also pose a threat to healthy people who exercise in an unfavorable environment. COVID studies have shown that poor air quality contributed to increased transmission of the COVID virus. The data on which the TTMM-S application is based comes from external measurement stations, scattered around the world. Their accuracy depends on GPS data and the frequency of data updates. The style of the alarms is balanced (very simple - color and text) without excessive scaring, easy to read. Language localization has been developed for seven languages.
The team worked according to the guidelines of my idea. The tap-to-change function allows the user to immediately obtain the selected type of information (date, biomedical data (calories, number of steps taken, distance, weather conditions, temperature, UV radiation and air quality). This is a great convenience and acceleration in user-device communication. Disabling unnecessary functions of the selected clockface is done on the phone screen, ensuring readability and comfort of selecting the necessary functions.
The background function with the index as UV is a creative transformation of the FEELTTMM project created years ago and mentioned above. The only serious problem is the multiplicity of communication links and data exchange between them. Clockface sends a request to the TTMM-S application, which, knowing the user's GPS location, downloads current weather data for the indicated location via the Internet and sends it to clockface. To optimize the device's battery and data consumption, this communication takes place in 30-minute intervals. The weakest link in this communication is the Fitbit device's Bluetooth transmission, which is based on third-party phone protocols and resources (Apple, Google, etc.).
Organizing projects into three groups allows you to organize and direct the recipients' thinking to read time in a specific way. This makes it easier to understand and learn how to read time visualizations. This division also makes it easier to choose a specific project, which is made based on the recipients' preferences.
The solutions used in the TTMM-S project will find their imitators - perhaps Apple or Google are already working on similar solutions and will introduce similar services to their smartwatches.
TTMM-S is a project for the FUTURE available today. It contains design solutions that are ahead of their time and an innovative practical approach to the problem of weather changes and the protection of human health and life. The project was also awarded in the IF Design Award competition and received the Red Dot Award confirming world quality.
The development and miniaturization of electronic devices and the evolution of power sources will allow for the placement of sensors measuring air temperature, UV radiation and air quality inside smartwatches. By sending data to the Internet, it will be possible to create a precise map of weather changes and air pollution. The key issue will be privacy, ownership and use of data.
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