Demise of wall clocks

In the foyer where the giant teddy bear with its lifeless gaze is watching crowds below, parents take pictures of their children with cellphones. Travellers from all over the world are buzzing about in the airport. This place feels like an extraterrestrial space station with air conditioners protecting humans from hostile desert weather outside. There is even a small botanic garden inside.

Battered by a fourteen hour flight, standing there before the final leg of our journey, we were happy regardless. We moved to an area where people watched an electronic display of flight schedules. 

I don’t wear a wristwatch. 

My cellphone was still showing Sydney time. I wanted to know what the local time was. 

I looked around, high ceilings, giant columns, gorgeous shop windows, shrines of Italian fashion brands, the giant teddy bear, and the flight schedule display, but no sign of a wall clock anywhere. 

Remembering gorgeous Swiss railway clocks and their imitations, I wonder what happened to them. 

We used to have wall clocks in foyers. They were useful artefacts of the analog age. If your mechanical wristwatch failed or you didn’t own one, you could always count on wall clocks. They were revered, communal objects.

With the rise of cellphones, we forgot wall clocks. 

Apple initially used the Swiss railway clock design without permission in iOS 6. Although the exact details of the licensing agreement are confidential. It was reported that Apple ultimately paid Swiss national rail operator SBB about CHF 20M (about US$ 22.4M as of January 2014) to license the use of the clock design. Apple later removed the design from its operating system with iOS 7 (Source: Wikipedia)

The cellphone clock is useful, precise, and doesn’t require readjusting. But cellphones are multifunctional devices, and displaying time is a demoted function. The clock is permanently present on the home screen and sometimes on the status bar. However availability of local time depends on the Location service that may not be available when you don’t have Internet access. That is often the case in airports.

My eyes scanned the flight display, no trace of the local time. 

Five minutes passed. Next to a label “Local Time” at the bottom of the flight display I saw a tiny digital clock. 

A deep sigh followed. 

Timeful

Managing work schedules is a crucial element of a modern workplace. For most, work days are fragmented in hourly, sometimes half-hourly time slots.

We use tools such as Outlook to book meetings and events. These tools are great, however they have some limitations. They lack intelligence and flexibility to help us fill gaps with sensible choices, and they don’t work well with our private activities outside work.

What if we have a smart app on our phone, that will merge Outlook calendar with our private organiser, and help us forming habits, manage our to do lists, and other events effortlessly, in addition to syncing with work schedules.

I give you Timeful, a smart time management app that does all that.

Timeful has AI (Artificial Intelligence) engine to track your habits. Its brilliance comes from the fact that it learns to work with you and your roughly defined schedules.

Say you want to form a new habit. Lets say you want to do Yoga, 3 times a week, mostly in the evenings, and at noon. Timeful is OK with rough schedules, it understands habit forming is hard, therefore it gives you flexibility to fit them into your existing schedule. When its sees a fit Timeful fills it with an activity you nominated. You either go for it, defer it or move it to another time slot with a simple gesture.

Timeful has a seamless, simple and a very easy to use interface. Adding a new to do item, a new habit, or scheduling an event is a breeze. Moving an item into a different time slot or deferring  is equally easy.

As time slots are fragmented, we ended up having diverse activities in shorter attention spans. This is a fact of 21st  century. Good or bad we have to live with it and we need ways to deal with it. Timeful comes handy with its AI, and friendly manners to help us go through our busy life style. It turns hectic into sensible.

Timeful

How to make a toast

How to make a toast by Ergun Coruh

The Talk

In his inspiring TED talk, innovator Tom Wujec talks about power of collaborative visualisation.

A group of people is asked to draw “how to make a toast”. This sounds simple, until someone asks to draw the process step by step. The exercise is repeated, individually and in group mode using moveable stickies on a white board.

Collaborative visualisation is a powerful tool.

Firstly, it engages everyone in the design process, by empowering individuals, by giving them equal opportunity to contribute their ideas. This leads to a more fulfilling, happier employee engagement. Secondly, in group mode, it allows the team to understand the problem and facilitates reaching a consensus, a faithful agreement on design.

Style

Not everyone is good at drawing. Even people who are good at drawing may not articulate ideas equally well. Would that be a problem? Do we need a visual language?

It is important to realise that equal engagement is primary value in Collaborative Visualisation. Everybody should be encouraged to draw regardless of their talent, it should be a fun process, a celebration of bringing together ideas.

There are simple techniques I discovered that everyone can take advantage of when drawing ideas. I believe everyone can learn them and gradually become better as they draw more.

Take a look at my drawing of “how to make a toast”.

Keep it simple

Remember this is not a drawing contest. We need to reflect ideas in the simplest possible way so that everyone can quickly understand concepts.

Draw thick

Thick lines encourage to draw simple figures. Simple figures are easier to understand, they don’t clutter ideas. It is important to pick the right sized pen, for a given medium (white board or stickies).

Avoid 3D

Stick with 2D drawings, they are easier to draw. 3D drawings tend to clutter the design. Take a look at my 2D toaster.

Dots, lines and curves

These are the only primitives you would need to draw a shape. Take a look at my toaster drawing again. It has simple visual cues to make it look like a toaster. The curvy edges on top, the switch on the left, a thick base, are common elements to most toasters. Coupled with a slice of bread that looks like a bread, it is impossible to miss it.

Avoid perfectionism 

Do not get carried away by drawing a perfect something, a perfect toaster for instance. It is more important for people to understand you drew a toaster, as opposed to a perfect slab that does not look like a toaster.

Shades and animation

Since we opted for using thick lines, how would we articulate a brown toast?

Use parallel lines to darken the surface of bread slice. You should use this technique judiciously though, overdoing it will clutter the drawing. Don’t forget the idea is to draw a brown toast everybody can understand, not a perfect brown toast.

Simple animation showing spatial motions using cartoon style hyphens have enormous power in articulating complex ideas. Nothing can demonstrate a toast being chaotically thrown into air at the end of a toasting process better than a skewed, brown bread with hyphens showing a movement from bottom to top.

Nodes, arrows and areas

Nodes are group of objects representing a stage in your design process. Arrows let you articulate how you connect nodes and build up your design. Pay attention to area alignment. Make sure you sufficiently separate nodes from each other, you leave enough space between them, so that they don’t appear on top of each other.