Brief 5 - Reflection on iPhone Project

I am extremely happy with the results of this project. I started off in a direction that was largely cosmetic, but ended up with a project that distilled several ideas into a clean and simple interface. For me, this project was about filtering. I started off with many different ideas for a ringtone with clock-like elements, and ended up with an alarmclock/calendar screensaver. Along the way I did research into different forms of measuring time. I looked at different interfaces, and the way people interacted with time management. Intrigued by the idea of physically interacting with the clock, I was inspired by an alarm clock I had seen at the British Museum, which utilized pegs and placeholders on dials to sound an alarm. Using this inspiration, I developed an alarm clock/calendar that used a similar system. By introducing different dials set within each other, I was able to display time on a scale of seconds right through to years. Initially thinking of an interface with inter-changeable skins, the focus being on user customization, I settled on choosing one skin to develop, the solar system. This was a natural choice, since the clock was partially inspired by planets aligning.
As I began to pare down the interface from a labored antique style orrery to a geometric abstraction of planetary orbits, and in turn changed the name from iConjunction (which my teacher Pete said sounded like "conjunctivitis") to the elegant and punny plan-it.
I decided to present the clock in the style of a commercial, and in doing so work on my presentation skills and approximate a tie-in with existing apple merchandising languages (I used the same font and the iconic plain white background from other apple commercials).
Though originally conceived as a gadget which could be used to set dates as well, peer feedback revealed that the interface may be too small to do that, and that the app might work better as a screensaver that is linked to events in the calendar and alarm clock.