Homeostasis

Ho·me·o·sta·sis: the tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, especially as maintained by physiological processes

That thermostat on the wall, the dull white box everyone has in their home. How do we bring this device into the technological age?

Our solution Homeostasis, the new home environmental management. This project was to create a system that would be used to monitor a household. Whether it be for monitoring the temperature in each room, managing electricity or maintaining safety features.

Initial Thoughts, Process & Prototype

Our first task was to start researching what functions a household would need. While we had considered many ideas like temperature adjustment, which we finalized into the app, other suggestions such as security and phone app compatibility were not implemented.

Taking those ideas we divided ourselves once again to produce our sketches, we took ideas and consideration of all the sketches and began processing how the flow and transition would be implemented. Our initial thought was to have many buttons, however it would have been a very cluttered screen.

Completed with Nicole Baena, Matthew Araujo & Rohan Bhardwaj

Used: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop & XD

Link to Prototype

Sketches

Afterthought & Style Tile

While our design at this stage works with a moderate degree of success, we realized there would have been more designs to consider, remove and replace. An example would be, how to change the screens were not specific, a consideration to add a compare button to the hydro page and removal of a timer to a stable temperature maintaining.

Mid-Fi & After-Afterthought

What we found when testing, presenting and reviewing the design, a few changes should be made to help adjust what we were envisioning. Previously many functions typically found on a thermostat were missing, this was revised. One major change was to the timer setting, we ended up making it an adjustment screen where you can turn on or off the heating/cooling and set timers for the lights. This makes the complicated process of setting timers into allowing the house to automatically heat/cool depending on the temperature.

The next step was to fix the visual design. While we did start off with a style tile the visual of the application ended up feeling flat and new button features have been added. We ended up deciding colours for buttons, another for user selection and lastly consistency with the icons that are simple and easy to understand.

Hi-Fi & Revision

With this project concluding, we have learned a lot on how to manage working as a group, sectioning different pieces of work off and working together. While having many different ideas and visions of what our final project would look like, we ended up simplifying work so it would maintain a visual design and fixed what users would find a burden. We have had our challenges during the project, however we understood what it took to make the project finish.

Going back to this project, I found many things that I would have personally changed. I ended up fixing some smaller issues such as icons being warped, buttons that were not unified and minor misplacement of buttons. These changes are seen in the prototype above

CATCHEN DESIGN