noto design concept

Noto is a concept that reimagines how we interact with notifications. In a world with abundant digital distractions, Noto creates a structured and controllable environment for your digital interactions. By implementing the principles of Calm Tech into your home, Noto enables you to determine when and where you engage with your digital world, ultimately reducing stress in everyday life.

The Notification Overload

The average person checks their smartphone 144 times a day. Fear of missing out drives compulsive checking every ten minutes on average. Notifications, unpredictable and overwhelming, disrupt our focus at work and moments of relaxation. This often causes us to lose focus on what truly matters. Noto provides a practical solution, helping you establish new habits to counteract this issue.

Noto categorizes and spatially assigns notifications, offering you control over when and where you receive them. In the home office, where personal and professional boundaries blur, Noto brings predictability and calmness to your digital interactions.

Organize and locate messages

Create personalized mailboxes for your specific needs. Next, assign them to designated rooms within your home. Within the rooms, dedicated message stations serve as hubs for storing and managing the corresponding notifications. This establishes distinct analogue boundaries for your digital world, ensuring a focused environment.

Store and fetch messages

When a station is activated, it grows with each notification stored. When you're ready to focus on your messages, simply push the top part down. This action clears the station and transfers the notifications to your devices. Rotate the top to deactivate the station when you're awaiting messages and prefer them delivered directly rather than stored.

Digital Foundation

Noto simplifies your notification experience directly from your lock screen. Notifications can be easily assigned to specific categories with a simple swipe to the left. In the background, an intelligent system learns from your interactions, automatically organizing future notifications. This on-the-fly configuration creates peace of mind, as you don't have to react immediately, but know that you can retrieve the message at the right time and place. To enhance clarity, notifications on the lock screen are neatly grouped based on their designated mailboxes.

Physical Integration

The message station seamlessly integrates into various interiors, designed to be unobtrusive and subtle, devoid of unnecessary lights or displays. Its status is easily recognizable at a glance. The variation in height provides a quick estimate of stored notifications, eliminating the need for detailed information. Serving as the interface for the Noto System, the station features an intuitive tactile hardware interface, allowing users to interact with familiar patterns: a push to drain and a twist to open or close.

Transforming How You Connect

Noto and its novel approach to notifications aim to create a calm and decelerated digital experience. You can focus on what is important at the moment and your smartphone is no longer a distraction; it now serves as a tool that shows only what you want, when you want it. This project was created by Leon Burg, Jannes Daur, Malte Fial and Johannes Rothkegel.