The Discreet Window was designed by Gizem Boyacioglu & Ishac Bertran; two students from Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID).

The Discreet Window is a blind that provides visual feedback for a home-office environment about the users’ work activity.

As an ambient display, The Discreet Window is a membrane that communicates the work intensity to both the home-office space and the outside. The more the user works, the less light is coming inside the room. Thus, the less visual contact there is between both sides of the window.

The user operates the blind using the small spheres attached to the control cord as a switch. By matching the colored sphere on the left side with the ones on the right side, the user swaps between the four modes: open, half-open, closed and graph. Selection of the graph mode displays information gathered from the computer about the time spent on work-related activity.

The home-office environment requires discipline to keep consistency in performance. Therefore, there is a need of self-monitoring since the individual is his own reference point in this working space.

Most of the current tools of self-monitoring provide intrusive alerts, bringing the risk of disturbing the optimal work pattern of the individual. Instead, the same information has more attractiveness and influence to the user when presented to him on demand as a summary over time.

The concept aims to offer a self-improvement tool which provides an overview of working routines in a non-intrusive manner.

Playing on words, The Discreet Window displays discreet data in a discrete manner, referring to the nature of the data and the subtlety in the way that is displayed. Moreover, the name gives a wink to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Rear Window, “La Ventana Indiscreta” in Spanish, which then literally translates as The Indiscreet Window.

Gizem Boyacioglu Website
Ishac Bertran Website