uni.me, a new mobile communication service centred on people’s availability

What if a mobile phone could provide easily glanceable information of people’s availability?

To answer that question, Ana Camila Pinho Amorim developed uni.me, a new mobile communication service and Ana’s graduation project at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

uni.me supports us in the management of our social network. People’s availability is the main criterion of uni.me’s interface design, which is centred on people and time, rather than folders and functionalities, and explores the distribution of people on (and off) the screen as the way to define people’s availability to one another.

As illustrated by the image on the left, the essence of the interface visualises our availability. The phone user’s availability to others is defined by opening and closing her scope of availability [light-blue circle], and therefore including more or less people within it. Other people’s availability to the user is visible by the colour change of the bubbles: people represented in white are currently available to her, people in blue not.

In fact, the interface is much richer and also allows for address book functions, text messaging, voice and data transfer, call and calendar management, etc, all of which is described in detail in the thesis report.

The project was supervised by Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels in his capacity as senior associate professor at Interaction-Ivrea.

Download thesis report (pdf, 7.55 mb, 60 pages)

UPDATE: Read Régine Debatty’s review of this project

(This post starts a series of short features on the graduation projects by the final students of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, now located in Milan. As of next week, the Institute will be entirely absorbed within the Domus Academy‘s ‘I-Design” programme.)