OneVision Resources is a personal technology and health concierge company. They’re well regarded in Greater Boston for their smart home design, installation, and management services. With the dizzying array of products available, they needed an elegant way to demonstrate the promise of smart home technology to their customers.
OneVision partnered with Fresh Tilled Soil to develop an interactive, fully-functional display that would allow their clients to experience and compare multiple smart home solutions. As the project’s chief designer, I facilitated discovery and ideation exercises, mapped the company’s objectives and users’ needs, and led the iterative design process.
As consultants, every project is a crash course in a brand new area of expertise. I dove head first into smart home technology, learning the capabilities, quirks, and caveats of dozens of devices. Despite the sheer number of components, the display needed to feel approachable—like part of a home, not Best Buy. We printed photos of the devices at scale in order to mock up countless layouts and configurations. Though the final design was perfected in software, physically prototyping the wall was crucial to reaching the best solution.
The final display is divided into four areas, each dedicated to an experience: climate, entry, lighting, and entertainment & control. The entertainment & control devices show up twice in order to simulate using control panels from across the house, as well as to accommodate a technical limitation: intercom interference.
The wall was recently completed and installed in OneVision’s downtown Boston office. Clients are guided along the wall, encouraged to interact with each area. The OneVision team explains the devices’ features, benefits, and tradeoffs. The wall has succeeded in clarifying technology’s many complexities and proven an effective tool in deepening client engagement. To hear OneVision’s take on the story, be sure to check out their excellent behind the scenes post.
Photo credit: Images of the final wall courtesy of OneVision
