VIEW +

Brief: Design and prototype a new accessory for the Huawei P9 smartphone to communicate its creative, luxury positioning. We started the project by researching and redefining what luxury means. In today’s world of immediacy of information and action, luxury is not shiny gold finish, new high tech device or a weekend in an expensive hotel. Luxury is time and comfort. It’s the way you feel when you are on holiday. It’s the experience of doing your tasks with easiness. It’s not getting worked up about small things. Thinking about this new kind of luxury, we asked ourselves “ how can we make the experience of using a smartphone better, easier and more pleasant for the user”. One of the obvious imperfections of smartphones today is their battery, which runs down in about a day or less. People have started using external batteries, caring them around all day, or battery covers on their phones, which make the phone much thicker and heavier. We researched all products available to market, as well as user’s behaviours, gestures and habits in order to create a user centered product. Our design is called View+ and is essentially a second screen for your smartphone. It is the same size of the phone, but uses colour e-ink technology, which makes it thin, light and very energy efficient, since it uses very little amount of energy. It is paper like, scratch resistant and viewable from every angle even in direct sunlight. This second display is attached to your smartphone with a case, which covers only the sides of the phone. The screen is connected to the phone with a magnetic cylinder, so taking off the screen is an easy and spontaneous gesture. Once the image has been sent to the e-ink display, the user is able to see it even if the phone is turned off. The screen can work by itself, but can also be magnetically connected to multiple screens in order to create a bigger one. The screens are paired to the phones via Bluetooth and an app which allows the users to select pictures or screenshots from their phone in order to send and display them on the screens.