Interview about Dominus plus Clock application., winner of the A' Interface, Interaction and User Experience Design Award 2012
Dominus plus expresses time in an original way. Like dots on dominoe pieces three groups of dots represent: hours, tens of minutes and minutes. The time of day can be read from the color of the dots: green for AM; yellow for PM. The application contains a timer, an alarm clock and chimes. All functions are navigable by touching discrete corner dots. It is had an original and artistic design presenting the actual 21st century Face of Time. It is designed in a beautiful symbiosis with Apple portable devices' cases. It has a simple interface with only a few necessary words to operate it.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsI wanted to visualize Time differently than global companies such as Apple have done so far - imposing a functional standard of readability and an impersonal style of visualizing time on recipients. Time is something personally unique to me. The pioneers in the field of personal visualization of Time were Kisai (Tokyoflash) and Nooka. The design spirit in these two companies encouraged me to search for and select my own - personal - development. Since the project was intended for mobile devices with iOS, its basis and point of reference was the iPhone and iPad screen. The basic value of the digital matter of the screen is a pixel, so I thought about abstracting it and scaling it to a circle. This resulted in the invention of structures that could represent mental representations of numbers, which are the basis for reading clocks and thinking about time. I made an intuitive decision to encode pairs of numbers in the form of 3 groups of characters. The first character encoded the hours and contained a graphic representing the numbers from 1 to 12. The second character encoded the tens of minutes from 0 to 50. The third character encoded the value of minutes from 0 to 9. Under the hour I placed a thin flashing line to separate the hours from the minutes as it was in digital clocks in the form of “:” and to emphasize the otherness of the seconds, which seem to be a pulse. The name Dominus Plus is a combination of the words DO, MINUS and PLUS to express the passing of Time, which in my opinion brings a loss and at the same time seeing a benefit in this loss. In this, in my recognition of the passing of Time, the essence of life is contained.
Wondering whether Time could have "its own" color, I decided to introduce two colors, green and gold. I assigned them two separate values of time experienced by a person: AM for youth and PM for maturity. The colors change at noon and midnight, marking two moments - birth and growth, and maturity and decline and end. If the clock were used by a person who was colorblind, the AM designation in the form of a small dot lights up on the left side of the screen, and the PM designation appears on the right side of the screen.
The decision to choose corner navigation was dictated by the fact that in the central part of the screen, the user can adjust the brightness of the screen in the TIME view and perform settings in the TIMER, ALARM and SETTINGS views. Thanks to this solution, touch functionality was preserved, which was variable depending on the view.
I have not conducted any research or surveys in this area, so I have no knowledge on the subject. Undoubtedly, the award for this visualization of time introduced a certain issue of possible change in the jury and users of the Dominus application and became a sign of "Different thinking", enriching the culture.
The uniqueness and convenience of the Dominus Plus application was recognized and appreciated by the Jury of experts of the A Design Award competition. The simplicity of the interface allows you to use it practically without reading the instructions. Thanks to this, we have the opportunity to experience an unusual way of interaction and to commune with abstract visualizations from the future. The application stimulates a different type of perception and thinking - I think this is priceless.
The correct symbiosis of the Dominus Plus project with Apple devices required research and understanding of the advantages of a specific device, such as screen size, bezel thickness and device scale. This knowledge can be compared to the feeling of a painting's canvas and its frame, on which the painting will be created. In this case, the canvas is glass and the paint is light. Decisions regarding the proportions and placement of interface elements respect the edge and mass of the digital stretcher.
I transferred the design decision regarding the visualization of TIME in the form of characters built from groups of dots to the TIMER and ALARM functions. Each function required a different solution for the arrangement of dots, e.g. the TIMER interface is built from 60 dots grouped into 6 rows of 10 dots, representing 60 minutes. A grid of dots arranged in this way allows you to set a decent time interval with one touch. And after starting TIMER, it allows you to observe the passing time. This visualization evokes in me the association of observing an hourglass, but in Dominus these are luminous circles disappearing in a digital matrix.
Answering this question after 12 years, my perspective on this issue has evolved. Electronic devices such as iPhone and iPad serve recipients to "save" (exploit) time, but for producers they serve to earn on the growing offer of digital goods. So we perform actions on these devices faster and more, and we spend the "saved" time on consuming even more digital goods. People do not have the space and time to experience and contemplate projects such as Dominus plus on mobile devices.
It is worth answering the question of what is behind my creative motivation. Am I driven by the desire to earn money or am I interested in exploring the meaning and artistic values? The first indicates a mainstream audience, the second is directed towards a niche of enthusiasts, intellectually and aesthetically awakened, of whom there is a permille in the population.
I tested the Dominus project only on myself. I chose the most efficient and visually intriguing solution. The finished product was used by recipients, but because I value privacy, I did not use tracking modules from which I could learn about the effectiveness of this solution.
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