Quantum
Hi Everyone,
Quantum essentially takes on the concept of a future mobile app where we could automate a lot of our daily tasks in our smart homes, allowing us to make better use of our time, thus enabling us to drive focus to areas that matter the most in our lives.
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The main premises of this entire concept is that I should be aware of what’s happening in my smart home, whether I’m inside it, or outside. I should also be in control of the entire experience. With recipes created by myself, my smart home could perform tasks based on a set of rules that I’ve imprinted in the app. Think about a kind of IFTTT but for a smart home, which I could use to automate and monitor it while being away on work, or on vacations, anywhere!
There’s some use cases that I’ve tried to demonstrate in these screens, but essentially you can create rules and schedules. Rules work as recipes, they’re based on conditions and they’re triggered when those conditions are met (I’m making the assumption that my smart home handles detection, through a potential sensor network and has the capability of actually performing these tasks). Schedules are time based events, they don’t need to have any other condition besides time itself.
Both rules and schedules can be assigned to certain profiles that can work as a shortcut to activate or deactivate a batch of these rules and schedules in one tap. We’re now augmenting the possibilities, which could be endless, as I could create many different profiles for different scenarios, and the most important thing: I would still be in control. I could arrive from work and trigger the “Night” profile and the assigned rules and schedules on that profile would start running. The AC would turn on automatically if the temperature rose above a predefined value. The washing machine would start based on a schedule. The vacuum cleaning robots would start if air dust particles would rise to a predefined value of ppm. The security cameras and motion detectors would be activated and send me an alert if unexpected activity was detected. And so on…
These rules and schedules can be assigned to more than one profile allowing me to reuse them across different scenarios and requirements I could potentially have. I can also perform actions directly from the mobile app, such as delaying, tweaking them, or performing more direct responses such as calling the fire-fighters if the smoke detector and thermostats detect an anomaly that could indicate a potential fire happening.
The Today screen is probably the most important place for monitoring everything. I can quickly select through multiple categories and find out what happened or what is due to happen in the future. I can also quickly know if something isn’t right in my home and as I’ve previously mentioned, accordingly act in response. Categories also play a crucial reporting mechanism as they provide a layer of organization that can help me quickly dig through essential areas. Leaks, Security, Climate, etc…
In regards to the visual design language, I wanted the app to feel futuristic. To achieve this I’ve tried to incorporate gradients, glows and other lightning effects to also augment the notion that the app is “alive”, that it’s a smart entity, almost like as if it were an AI. When an alert is shown in the app, telling me that something is not right, I see a pink / reddish glow that quickly catches my attention. While I’m not showing any animation examples, my main vision is that the app should feel like it’s in motion but with a whole network / connection concept in mind. When I open a category bubble, it should smoothly expand into the edges of the screen showing the rules and schedules that are active on that category. This apparent connectivity is also the reason why I called it Quantum.
There’s so much more I’d love to share, and unfortunately I couldn’t spend more time designing screens that could exemplify other use cases and specially those that would demonstrate how the app would work like when contradictions would appear, such as what would happen if I activate a new profile? Would I get a notification letting me know which rules and schedules would become inactive and those that were commonly assigned? All the smallest of details matter, and a lot of those I’ve tried to take into account anyway. :)
I hope you enjoy this conceptual exploration, and let me know what you think in the comments bellow. My sincere apologies for the wall of text!
Attachments:
quantum_preview.png
quantum_overview.png