A physical alarm clock for a networked age

Social Alarm Clock was part of Nokia’s Project Trust, a strategic design-fiction study of trust, social data, and domestic devices. I led the project in 2011 while working with Nokia Design Strategic Projects in Los Angeles.

Project Trust asked how trust might be understood in an era when organizations and institutions did not always seem to have the public’s best interests at the heart of their business. The work included interviews with social scientists, studies of consumer behavior, field interviews, and the embodiment of trust questions in objects, interfaces, and devices.

Off the phone

Social Alarm Clock began by taking the study of networked alarms out of the phone.

Working inside the phone would have brought its existing menus, notifications, application boundaries, and operating-system challenges into the study from the outset. Making a separate, working clock let us concentrate on the behaviors of waking: hearing something, looking toward it, reaching for a control, or letting it continue.

The clock had a place beside a bed, a display visible at a distance, and controls that could be touched. We could consider how networked information might enter those first moments of the day through sound, social signals, and the physical presence of an object.

Changing the conditions of discovery

A physical prototype can isolate an area of study without specifying a physical product. The clock’s position, scale, sound, display, and physical controls gave us different ways to approach the experience of waking.

What might someone hear before looking at a display? How might an alarm’s presence change when it sits across the bedside table? What gestures does it invite when someone wants to postpone it or turn it off? The working object let us stay with these questions while setting aside the phone OS’ feature set and implementation problems.

What to do on Monday?

How does this move into what was then Nokia’s bread and butter, the smartphone?

Well, this isn’t product-program work, and the conduits from applied speculation happening in California to a fairly structured product organization in Finland were not direct nor immediate, sadly. So the influence becomes a bit of atmosphere for an organization that was otherwise focused more on survival than innovatoin and evolution.

We developed a proposal for Nokia’s design organization that brought the physical prototype’s questions back to the phone OS’ alarm clock feature. The Social Alarm Clock deck describes a platform and API for network-enabled MeeGo alarms, supported by a sequence of phone UI screens.

The questions developed through the physical study informed this software proposal. The slides show how the design team addressed alarm content, common controls, and the moment of waking within MeeGo’s interface.

Select a slide to view its annotations at full size.

What do you wake to?

Putting the alarm beside the bed let us consider the sounds and information someone might encounter on waking. The phone proposal carried that question into alarm selection: a radio program, friends’ updates, important mail, or a sunrise. The Clocks application would offer reusable alarms, a choice of alarm types, and downloads from the Ovi Store. A “Tomorrow” panel placed weather, meetings, birthdays, and other reminders alongside the alarms.

What stays familiar when the alarm changes?

Working with the object let us consider how an alarm’s behavior might vary through sound, information, and the way someone responds to it. In the phone proposal, each alarm creator had a defined area for its own action, colors, background image, and sound. Shared repeat and snooze settings, together with cancel and confirm buttons, kept the basic controls consistent across alarm types.

How do you respond while waking?

The bedside object also brought attention to the moment of responding to an alarm: hearing it, looking at its display, reaching for a control, and postponing or stopping it. The phone proposal addressed those actions on the lock screen, where each alarm could display its own imagery and information. Unlocking would stop the alarm. A snooze button beneath the content could trigger a response specific to that alarm application.

The proposal gave Nokia’s design organization a set of phone interactions informed by the earlier study of waking behaviors and physicality. The deck also proposed extending the same model to the other clocks on MeeGo devices.

Possible alarm experiences

The deck then works through possible alarm experiences: NPR Radio for a favorite broadcast, Postman for important mail, Tweeter Out-Loud for friends’ updates, Wake Me Up for someone special, George Clooney for waking with someone famous, and Sunrise for waking with the sun. These examples gave the proposed platform different kinds of content and behavior to accommodate, including radio, messages, voices, and an ambient morning display.

Applied Speculation and Design Fiction

In this project, Applied Speculation and Design Fiction involved choosing and making an object through which to study behavior. The bedside clock let us examine waking through distance, sound, touch, and the expectations surrounding a familiar domestic object.

The choice of prototype changes which aspects of an experience are available for examination. A bedside clock gives sound a location and a gesture a physical target; a phone introduces a handheld screen, menus, and notifications.

Prototype films

The released films show the physical artifact as a working object: handled, adjusted, docked with a phone, and situated in a domestic setting. They keep the relationship between the phone and the clock visible while giving the clock its own presence, behavior, and scale.

The assembled Social Alarm Clock prototype with a docked Nokia phone.

A hand operates the physical clock while the phone and display remain visible.

The clock enclosure with its top phone dock and dark display.

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