Sketchbook | Fiona MacNeill | Macknowlogist

Hone Smart Home

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of my last entry I outlined my discovery that there was an app building company called Bubble, which would likely lead to brand confusion. As a result I decided to go back to some of the ideas on and consider other possibilities that would tackle some of the same goals. The following company traits need to be suggested by the name:

Organisation, finesse, attention to detail
Protection and/or care
Attentiveness
A connection to housing and or containment

Initially I came up with “Corral”, especially as I thought that this would appeal to the Smart Home market in the United States which seems to be more fully developed than that of Europe (I have sought data to prove this but a lot of the market research is behind pay walls, I did however find a nice snippet from Statista included below).

“Corral” suggests containment, gathering and shepherding something that is perhaps unruly. There could also be a potentially useful or possibly tacky mnemonic in that “IoT Corral” would remind users of “O.K. Corral” (O.K. Corral (building), n.d.) , another US connection. However, I decided this would likely err on the tacky-side. “Corral” is quite a specific idea so I tried out some new logo ideas and also had a think about rocking the minimalist boat by creating a more three-dimensional logo.

Shapes which could suggest a corral - essentially an abstracted animal pen.

Shapes with the shadow casting turned on. This allowed me to think about how these images would look if they were simplified into 2D shaded areas to provide the illusion of depth and perspective. I created these images in Sketchup (Trimble, 2017), a piece of software which I will undoubtedly use for some of the graphic prototyping in the app. I have a background in 3D modelling and the smart home visualisations will be more effective if they are modelled architecturally.

In this version I omitted the lines in order to see how pue shading would look.

[Was once a linked image to the logo for Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe - link is no longer available in 2021 when this post was archived]

I was thinking of something like this logo but with a top and bottom section and more shading placed over logo text or on the left of the logo image (Stankowski & Duschek, 1992 as in Hyland & Bateman, 2011, p. 266).

The “Corral” concept although an equilateral has some similarities to a circle or oval and could suggest protective and nurturing qualities as we learned from the initial lecture with Phil Jackson. It could also be seen to bear representational similarity to an eye depending upon the placement of the logo title text.

“Corral” wasn’t quite working for me, it felt too fortified and possible too specific to the United States, it also started to remind me of a bank or credit card and there needs to be something more personal and homely about this product. Once again I changed tact.

The next idea that I pursued was to develop the word “Hone” as the company or app name. I immediately had a better gut feeling about this word especially when combined with my “IoT” trademark-style embellishment. On the surface level there is a nice mnemonic in that the word rhymes with “Home” and upon searching there aren’t any competing products with the same name.

“Hone” is a verb which when used with no object is often confused with the concept of homing in on something as opposed to sharpening, perfecting or focusing which is the correct meaning; another “home” association, even though it is incorrect it is actually of benefit (Hone in vs. hone in, 2015). The only consideration with the word itself is that if viewed from a distance in a font without a high ascender on the “h” it could be read as “none”; this may mean that a capital letter at the start of the word is preferable. With this in-mind I started with the typefaces I had explore of what I had first in the Adobe Creative Suite (Adobe, 2017) and then took a look at some Google fonts (Google, 2017a). Initially I started with quite chunky fonts and felt that I would like to include a powerbutton in the design to indicate control rather than making the home connection explicit by using a symbol. This also felt like it would allow space for the company and app to expand to the commercial sector if the connection was more subtle.

The first electronic Hone logo mock-up using the Montserrat Subrayada (Ulanovsky, n.d.) font and Prosto One (Lemonad & Emelyanov, n.d.) fonts.

This initial logo was too blocked and the plugged-in nature of the black lines, reminiscent of wires connecting each letter suggested an audio system or electronic music genre. I created a contact sheet of fonts based to keep for future reference and to trial in some logo designs: You can view this at the .

I tried out a few more ideas based on some hinting towards the futurism and vorticism art movements (see 2, 6 and 7), although these experiments proved to be overly busy and vaguely reminiscent of the cognitive dissonance I encountered the time I observed the design of the “It’s a small world” ride at Disneyland in CA, USA.

Gbklyn, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

I ran the logo contact sheet by a few people via social media, just for some initial thoughts and they gave me some good things to think about particularly the difference between European and US design tastes (an even split of EU and US comments). This also challenged some assumptions I had made about the better designs, so I will work up the best ideas in time for the session with Phil in order to get his feedback on the concept.

As a final piece of research to confirm that “hone” was a solid choice of word for branding I looked at the Google Ngram viewer (Google, 2017b). The Ngram Viewer allows you to search Google books content from 1800 - 2008 based on boolean word queries. So I searched for “hone” and I was interested to find that the capitalised form of the word was at the peek of it’s popularity around 1910 right at the end of the Edwardian era. I have made comparisons between the current state of Internet of Things (IoT) to the disarray around .

For example, during the Edwardian period there were different current voltages for electrical supply in different areas of England surly a recipe for fire or electrocution; IoT has many different wireless frequencies and no common consensus on standards so it isn’t all that different (although accidental death is less likely). This Edwardian connection provided more design inspiration and made me think that deriving inspiration from Edwardian architectural etchings and engravings may look more modern than 3D models which look dated very quickly. For example, Hive which is British Gas’s Smart Home thermostat has a lovely simulation interface, but the home simulated with 3D graphics looked like an early 2000s computer game (it seems that British Gas might have realised this too and the demo is now harder to find on the site, but still seems accessible via this link: [link no longer available]. With this in mind I considered what a banner could look like for hone, the logo needs some tracking adjustments, but this was a first try with some basic layer blending and a clean finish.

Phil also suggested that I look at some different wood finishes if I stick with this aesthetic. After coming back to this header test after a couple of days the current wood finish sort of reminds me of that cheap MDF coated board, so I definitely need to look at some alternatives. Something with more of a creamy background like this futurist drawing might be better.

By Antonio Sant'Elia - Utopie metropolitane, la mostra (in Italian). Style & Design. l'Espresso (2013-03-28). Retrieved on 2013-04-01., Public Domain, Link

References

Adobe. (2017). Adobe creative cloud [Computer software]. Retrieved from https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud.html

Google. (2017a). Google fonts. Retrieved from the Google fonts website: https://fonts.google.com/

Google. (2017b). Google Ngram viewer. Retrieved from the Google Ngram Viewer website: https://books.google.com/ngrams

Home in vs. hone in. (2015) [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://blog.dictionary.com/hone-in-vs-home-in/

Hyland, A., & Bateman, S. (2011). Symbol. London, England: Lawrence King Publishing Ltd.

Lemonad, J., & Emelyanov, P. (n.d.). Prosto one. Retrieved from https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Prosto+One

O.K. Corral (building). (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved February, 18, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O.K._Corral_(building)

Trimble. (2017). SketchUp Make [Computer software]. Retrieved from http://www.sketchup.com/download?sketchup=make

Ulanovsky, J. (n.d.). Montserrat subrayada. Retrieved from https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Montserrat+Subrayada

Naming - initial ideas

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

On this page of my sketchbook I used a dice rolling exercise (Barnard & Briscoe, 2016) to explore different name combinations for the potential company. Initially I gravitated towards BubbleHome as a concept.

I then completed two iterations of the Lean Business canvas and fleshed out the idea a bit more. To summarise the main points, as this plan is likely to evolve over time:
Problem - top 3 problems

Each device has its own management system - this is a lot to keep track of
There is not a user-friendly way to map and monitor a smart home ecosystem in one place
Devices can have significant security issues when not setup correctly

Solution - top 3 solutions

Aggregate operational updates from devices via open api
Provide a mapping tool allowing users to position devices in a model of their home and review synchronous operations
Provide security advice based on device ecosystem and configuration patterns.

The cost structure versus the customer segment is a bit of a sore point in the canvas plans. The development costs seem like they will be very high in comparison to the small audience for this product in Europe. Marketing this product to US consumers might reap more benefits as there are a greater number of smart home products specifically marketed in the United States. The research to prove this is largely behind heady pay walls (NPD, 2017) but the main products such as Nest (Google, 2017b) and SmartThings (Samsung, 2017) were initially launched in the United States and therefore logically it makes sense that they may have larger customer segments in the United States as opposed to Europe. Another factor which I was able to locate recent research on was that security cameras are the most popular devices (NPD, 2016). This emphasis on security could serve my solution as well, as IP cameras are for security, but if they are compromised that could present some huge privacy issues and security issues for the end-user. It reminds me of the Shodan baby cam story (Porup, 2016) from last year and this thread on Reddit (jenn_and_tonic, 2016):

I spent a bit of time sketching logo ideas for a logo. I felt like I wanted BubbleHome to be approachable so initially I considered a bespoke serif script font. However, this would be rather unconventional for a tech-focused company where clean sans-serif screen fonts are the norm. I tried out the idea of including a house pictogram in the logo, but it kept looking more like an upload symbol than a house/home and I felt that it would narrow the scope of the solution (visually exclusive; what about apartments?), and there might be future expansion into corporate solutions.

This version was too busy and was really just a test. The blue background seemed caring and trustworthy, as did the circular bubble formation. I decided to take these elements forward to the next version. Font: DIN Alternate Bold // Background colour: #448ccb

I really liked this version and the evolution of “IoT” for Internet of Things becoming a trademark-like descriptor providing immediate context. To back up my assumption that IoT is an understood concept, I did a bit of digging in Google Trends (Google, 2017a). I compared several search terms and was interested to find that the interest in IoT now far outstrips “Internet of Things” although it could be that some are searching to find out what the acronym means! I also looked at “Smart Home” and “IFTTT” (main competitor in theory) for comparison. Another interesting observation was that the “Smart Home” term seems to be greater interest in the United States and the United Kingdom and “IoT” seems to be more prevalent elsewhere - this might be partially explained by the translation of Smart Home into different languages. This is something to bear in mind though with regard to marketing.

[Had to remove older Google Trends data]

I got as far as creating a Hero image for the Bubble or BubbleHome concept and then found that there was app builder with the name Bubble ( ) and very distinctive logo and I felt that this would like affect the success of the concept as an independent brand.

Plus there is a danger that people might think of a house like this:

Back to the drawing board…

References

Porup, J. M. (2016, January 23). “Internet of Things” security is hilariously broken and getting worse. ArsTechnica. Retrieved from https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/how-to-search-the-internet-of-things-for-photos-of-sleeping-babies/

Barnard, D. & Briscoe, R. (2016, June 14). Workshop on creating games and playful interations for adult learning in public spaces. Workshop presented at the first conference on Playful Learning, Manchester, UK. Abstract retrieved from http://conference.playthinklearn.net/blog/programme/full-abstracts-thursday-14th#10

Google. (2017a). Google trends search [Computer software]. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=smart%20home,IFTTT,Internet%20of%20Things,IoT

Google. (2017b). Nest learning thermostat. Retrieved from the Nest website: https://nest.com/uk/

jenn_and_tonic. (2016, June 19). I bought and returned a set of WiFi connected home security cameras. Forgot to delete my account and I can now watch the new owner [Electronic forum post]. Retrieved from https://redd.it/4ortwb

Maurya, A. (2016). Lean canvas. Retrieved from https://leanstack.com/lean-canvas/

NPD. (2016). Network connected cameras account for the majority, 61 percent, of U.S. home automation industry revenues. Retrieved from https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/2016/safety-and-security-are-lead-drivers-in-smart-home-technology-interest--according-to-npd-connected-intelligence/

NPD. (2017). Home automation. Retrieved from http://www.connected-intelligence.com/our-research/home-automation

Samsung. (2017). SmartThings - smart home system. Retrieved from the Samsung SmartThings website: https://www.smartthings.com/uk/