Infinity Pool In A Wristwatch
Dickon Isaacs, Motorola’s director of design for wearables, was faced with a daunting task when creating the Moto 360 with his team of designers, engineers, researchers and prototypers. Their goal was to design a wristwatch with the elegance and style of a timeless timepiece but containing the most advanced wearable computing technology available today. The Moto 360 is a decidedly futuristic device to be worn comfortably in the present.
Isaacs: It’s really discrete. So you can glance quickly at your wrist which I think is socially more acceptable than picking your phone out of your pocket and holding it up in front of you. That breaks any interaction you are having with the person you are talking to. Because the watch is touching your skin, there are some really nice things that you can do around what we call ‘haptic feedback.’ So, when you get a new notice from someone there’s a small vibration on your wrist. Your phone doesn’t ring. And you don’t even have to pull your arm all the way up in front of you. You can, through the sensors, literally just twist your wrist and that natural action will wake up the display so you can quickly glance and see what the message is about.
Some of the earliest design concepts we had were interesting exercises in form. We were making good progress in terms of dealing with ergonomics, but we weren’t really hitting it cleanly when it came to this idea of fashion and lifestyle. The prototypes ended up looking like tech gadgets, almost like parodies of what a smartwatch should look like. After doing a couple of rounds of that we said this is conceptually the wrong approach. Rather than approach the design in terms of what we could do with existing technology, we decided to start from the beginning with a blank piece of paper and say, ‘What should this object be?’ If you say ‘It’s a watch,’ we felt like that answered many questions, firstly that it has to be round. Culturally that form is understood, globally it has universal appeal, and that’s what we really wanted, to launch a product that people understood right away.
One of them was letting the content ultimately be the most important thing, and trying to maximize the size of that display all the way out to the edge of the watch. We had to push the boundaries of display technologies and construction technologies to get a thin border of metal just around the display, and when it lights up for those pixels to illuminate all the way out to the edge of that lens. It’s kind of magical the first time you see it, and emotionally we think that’s really crucial.
Prototyping is essential, and a lot of rapid prototyping. So we used a 3D printer that can print with hard and flexible materials. We used that for a quick check of the size and proportion of the product early on. We were able to rapidly build something overnight, a band design for example, and look at the fit and form of it the next day. Designing for the wrist is an ergonomic design challenge. You’re trying to balance size, weight, and proportion while trying to clear the wrist bones. The end result needs to feel modern and sleek. So we made a ton of prototypes. And then we quickly moved to machining in stainless steel because we wanted to see what the form looked like in the real material.
There were a lot. Getting the Bluetooth antenna to work through the stainless steel housing was a big deal. It’s really hard — antennas don’t like metal, so there’s a lot of phenomenal engineering that went into figuring out how to make that work. Developing a round display that works and looks as good as it does, and with the thinnest of borders outside of the edge so we could maintain that proportion of display to metal, was crucial and very difficult. With existing off-the-shelf round displays we’d end up with a big frame around the display and a small viewing area. Someone described that what we were really going for was the visual effect of looking at the top of an infinity pool.
Much of our design work involved optimizing all the different layouts and areas of the UI. Whether it’s notifications or the weather app, we had to optimize those layouts in terms of icon size, text size, and legibility, and work through the details of user interaction with Android Wear, the watch’s operating system. What’s great about moto360 as a modern timepiece, is that OTA (over the air) software updates will continue to breathe new life into the product, with improved performance and experiences, that will continue to delight owners.
The response from the developer community has been awesome. We focused on optimizing for the performance and the resolution of the display, and making sure that we get the right sort of colors dialed in for the color saturation. But then seeing everybody go to town with all these little sites that crop up, and people designing, sharing, and selling watch faces online— that’s cool. I think that the interest from developers was there in part because we offered the first round smartwatch. The round face makes it more interesting for developers who can then say, ‘I develop for more than one hardware archetype.’
We’re designing objects that are modern, that to most people very much represent the future of where technology is going. And so there has to be a sense of modernism in terms of the form, the detailing, and the material choices we use. We wanted to use premium materials, and that meant we also wanted to use leather. Luckily for us we were actually able to find a phenomenal tannery here in Chicago called Horween, who we’ve formed this really great working relationship with — family run business, five generations, they’ve been in Chicago 105 plus years. They develop premium leather at the highest quality, and I think it shows.
Inspired by high end timepieces, an aspirational design principle I discussed early on with our team was to consider the Moto 360 like an heirloom. It’s a product that our Motorola wearables team has designed, built, and crafted at such a level that is enduring and gets better with time.
