Trendbook 01
Minimalism
Google Inc.
Roles: Brand Identity | Company Positioning | Design Strategy | Creative Direction | Product Design | Launch Strategy | User Experience Strategy
Glass is a new type of wearable device that contains all the power and functionality of your smartphone, but hands-free. It is light, sleek, and allows you eye contact with people and your world at all times.
You wear Google Glass on a frame just like you would a pair of glasses. You glance up and to the right to look at a small screen. It has a camera, a microphone, and a speaker, and you can control everything with just your voice.
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It’s designed to make two things easier for you. One is getting you information that’s really timely and relevant, like a search result, or walking directions. The other is making it easy for you to communicate with the people you care about, like being able to make a phone call even while your hands are full, or taking and sharing a photo without interrupting or missing the moment.
When a few of the team at Google [x] set out to build Glass, they wanted to make something that was the opposite of complicated. We think technology should work for people; to be there when they need it and get out of their way when they don’t. We believe that the closer we bring technology to them, the more we succeed in getting it out of their way.
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Through Glass, a group of us from Google[x] started to build this kind of technology, one that helps people explore and share their world, and puts them back in the moment.
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Not augmented reality.
Reality, reality.
Now
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Glass is a technology that enhances the here and now. It lets us capture moments without technology getting in the way. It makes us smarter by giving us access to the world’s information without having to lift a finger. It makes getting around easier by providing hands-free navigation whenever we want. It is light and at your fingertips. Glass is for everything you do, now.
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Human
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Glass is an extension of you, designed to fit seamlessly into your everyday life. It’s a deeply intimate product and one that will amplify the way you live.
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Simplicity
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From the design to the software, everything about Glass is based around the idea of minimalism, beauty and attention to detail. For the design itself, we took everything away until we were left with the essentials and that’s our approach to everything we do.
More so than any other Google products, Glass will have many touch points in both the digital and the physical world. Glass is a philosophy, it is software, it is hardware, and it is a statement.
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Accordingly the user journey should feel consistent, independent of the touchpoint. From the cut of the uniform of a sales associate to the pixels in the UI, from a billboard to the front door of a Glass Studio, from the first time you put the product on to the way you talk about it, from point of reference to point of sale, everything needs to seamlessly connect and feel viscerally aspirational.
The Basecamps were designed to be the first physical touchpoint for new customers and a curated user experience for introducing people to how the Glass device works. Through a series of carefully orchestrated steps, new customers walk through the main functions of the device and best practices to get the most out of the product.
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A Glass space is designed to maximize interactions between people: Glass employees and, more importantly, clients between themselves. To a large extent, Glass is a tool that is still waiting for people to fulfill it's many potential uses. The space will be designed to get people talking and inventing the future of the product.
