DI: What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
NOERDEN : CITY is a professional Hybrid SmartWatch with one-year battery life that goes beyond 24/7 activity tracking with a myriad of smart assistant features for young business travelers who don’t want to sacrifice style for function.
DI: What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?
NOERDEN : This design answers the needs of a consumer base that seeks a healthy lifestyle while still maintaining a highly active work life. They need designs that match their business style, that can follow them everywhere from the gym to the boardroom, while providing them with the benefits of smartwatches. Thanks to activity tracking and smart assistant functions our design help them to reach work-life balance.
How to respect traditional watch design while simultaneously integrating smart functions that modern consumers are coming to expect in a wide range of products.
How to find solutions to making the battery life as long as possible (currently one year which is 20 times longer than other smartwatches).
DI: What are your future plans for this award winning design?
NOERDEN : We will continue to create smart products with a strong focus on design to inspire a healthy lifestyle. We focus on consumer needs, especially how to make the scenario usage more convenient without disrupting the initial product use. We bring together the best of design and high-tech to develop products that naturally fit our daily life. In the future, we will continue to develop hybrid smart watches, as well as extend our product portfolio in order to create a wide network of products to accompany you in every aspect of your health.
DI: How long did it take you to design this particular concept?
NOERDEN : We spent 4 months focusing on consumer research as well as design trends, then 2 months of concept drafts before starting the real design and prototypes.
DI: Why did you design this particular concept? Was this design commissioned or did you decide to pursuit an inspiration?
NOERDEN : This product is the direct answer to our General Manager initial need - which led to the creation of our company: as a young business traveler surfing on the tech trend, he was looking for a smartwatch to help him improve his healthy lifestyle to reach life-work balance. However, he didn't want a digital screen that wouldn't match the suit business style and couldn't find one with a design that could follow him everywhere from the gym to the boardroom.
DI: Is your design being produced or used by another company, or do you plan to sell or lease the production rights or do you intent to produce your work yourself?
NOERDEN : Our products are assembled by an external factory. Our designs are patented and we are the only one commercializing them. We don't intend to lease production/commercialization rights in the future.
The final product with packaging is ready to go to market. We are planning to launch it on January 25th, 2017 in China first before extending to other markets.
DI: What made you design this particular type of work?
NOERDEN : Our design follows the design trends and tastes of our target audience. Our objective was to create a watch that not only is highly qualitative and good looking, but also very useful thanks to its myriad of smart functions. The no-digital screen choice allows us to improve user experience by not disrupting their product habits, as well as offering a 1-year battery all functions on and remove the charging constraint that other smartwatches have.
DI: Where there any other designs and/or designers that helped the influence the design of your work?
NOERDEN : We took inspiration in traditional timepieces, Scandinavia product design, and minimalist design in general. In addition, we can find on the face our brand signature: the two horizontal lines. They are inspired by the airplane horizontal altitude symbol and represent the creation concept of CITY: inspire work-life balance. Finally, all managers of our company are deeply involved in the design process: as typical consumer target, we design products like if they were for us, test them ourselves, to ensure they answer a real need.
DI: Who is the target customer for his design?
NOERDEN : Young business travelers who don't want to sacrifice style over function.
DI: What sets this design apart from other similar or resembling concepts?
NOERDEN : Most of smartwatches have a digital screen, looking like a small clunky computer on the wrist. Our design looks like a traditional quality timepiece, offering the same benefits as most smartwatches thanks to our free integrated app. The battery life goes on average up to 1-year all functions on, which allows users to focus on what matter without worrying about charging. We assemble usual activity tracking functions together with smart assistant functions when these are usually separated to target different consumer audiences.
DI: How did you come up with the name for this design? What does it mean?
NOERDEN : We searched for hundreds of name, all expressing the benefits of the products, when we finally came up to the idea of coming back to the origins of this concept and the life of our target audience: this product is designed for business travelers, who live in bustling cities around the world. It's a business style for an urban lifestyle. Furthermore, it follows our brand product name concept: short, easily memorable and expressing the common daily concept.
DI: Which design tools did you use when you were working on this project?
NOERDEN : Concept research and design: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop
3D modeling: Solidworks, AutoCAD, Keyshot
Video edition: Adobe Premiere
DI: What is the most unique aspect of your design?
NOERDEN : Invisible Tech is hidden behind the heart of CITY: the latest and smallest high-tech sensors bring this traditional quality timepiece to the smart level. The 1-year battery all functions on is a huge user benefit when considering most of the smartwatches on the market need to be charged on average every week.
DI: Who did you collaborate with for this design? Did you work with people with technical / specialized skills?
NOERDEN : CITY is the result of great teamwork: our General Manager expressed his original need for a smartwatch with traditional timepiece quality design. I worked together with our Industrial Product Director who gave me directions, guidance and support during the whole process, with marketing department to understand our target consumer needs and tastes, with engineers to develop the high technology hidden part and improve the functions use to create the best consumer experience, with IT team to develop an APP that fits our consumer needs, the product use and stabilize the connection between the hardware's firmware and the softaware. Finally, at NOERDEN we are all passionate people with a common ambition, and everyone participates into creating great designs to improve our daily lives. No matter if it's a commercial commenting about the products he met during his latest business trip around a coffee, a color discussion with the graphic designer, or the e-commerce managers analysis about the best sellers on Chinese giant platforms. We created this design because it represents us and we are the target audience ourseves.
DI: What is the role of technology in this particular design?
NOERDEN : Technology has a very important place in our product since it is what makes us different from a traditional timepiece. It is also the most complex part of the project since we are using the latest high-tech and there aren't so many people able to manage it around the world. In addition, it is thanks to technology that our product follows our company mission, inspire a healthy lifestyle, via all the smart functions.
DI: Is your design influenced by data or analytical research in any way? What kind of research did you conduct for making this design?
NOERDEN : We conducted several consumer research, from qualitative focus groups to quantitative surveys. We deeply analyzed the competition, their advantages and weaknesses in order to create a product that could offer the best experience. Also this is our second product, and we benefit from the experience of our first product LIFE, which is also a hybrid smartwatch, but more a fashion tech-cessorry with a younger target audience. We could analyze the consumer comments and feedback in order to improve different aspects for CITY, as well we could confront our business traveler target consumers to our first products to gather their reactions and develop a new product totally in line with their needs and tastes: more smart assistant functions, bigger diameter, more technical design, information display directly on the watch face, longer battery life.
DI: What are some of the challenges you faced during the design/realization of your concept?
NOERDEN : How to answer the needs of a consumer base that seeks a healthy lifestyle while still maintaining a highly active work life.
How to make the smart usage scenario easier without changing normal watch-use habits. How to respect traditional watch design while simultaneously integrating smart functions that modern consumers are coming to expect in a wide range of products.
How to find solutions to making the battery life as long as possible (currently one year which is 20 times longer than other smartwatches).
DI: How did you decide to submit your design to an international design competition?
NOERDEN : After all the hard work on consumer research, design, and functions experience, we are very happy of the result and got very good first consumers and distributors feedbacks. We wanted to challenge ourselves further, and submit our product to experts in their area. This award would be a great reward for our efforts as a startup living up to international brands quality standards, as well as a proof for our consumers that they can rely on our products. Finally, this would be without doubt of a great help when it comes to communicating about our new product.
DI: What did you learn or how did you improve yourself during the designing of this work?
NOERDEN : A timepiece is a very complex and precious product, all the design details on the watch should be carefully calculated, the index, the dual, even the buttons. We tried every possibility, sometimes with only half millimeter difference, in order to make our product look balanced. We like the moto 'less is more' and achieving a minimalist design can be much more challenging than creating complex designs since every detail matters and is here for a real reason, there is no place for flourishing.
Trough this experience, the biggest challenge for me was to understand the link between the design and the smart technical part, to create a design that would adapt to the smart use in order to provide with the best consumer experience.
I learned especially about technical watchmaking, high-tech integration into a traditional design, and how to create harmony with minimum details.
DI: Any other things you would like to cover that have not been covered in these questions?
NOERDEN : This design is already sitting as a final product with packaging in our warehouse, ready to go to market. Product launch is planned on January 25th in China, and overseas soon after. As a startup, getting this reward would be a great support to proof the quality of our design to both consumers and potential distributors, and could immensely participate into the growth of our brand and international expansion.
