Infinity Pool
In A Wristwatch
Designing the Moto 360
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.