TOMI: The City's Best Friend

Interactive Screen Design by TOMI WORLD

The inspiration behind TOMI was a technical challenge: how to meet the needs of both visitors and locals in a city, providing them with location-specific information and services while also engaging them in a fun and interactive way. The design team at TOMI WORLD sought to create a hyperbolic interface that would stimulate a sense of belonging among users, merging the lessons learned from two main digital media - TV and mobile - with public signage to create a design that would fit seamlessly into the living rooms of cities.

What sets TOMI apart is its unique approach to human-computer interaction in digital urban equipment. It combines the user experience of corporate TV and mobile, maximizing the call-to-action rate of users who read and reducing the learning curve of those who interact. The design also targets the chameleonic emotional engagement of urban users with digital media equipment, challenging aesthetic ties with ergonomics, public spaces, and users.

The design of TOMI is oriented towards the new paradigm of public screens: a 100% multi-touch and multi-user interface for full HD screens without external buttons, such as a hard keyboard. The design entices people to interact with a large screen in public urban places through the aesthetic of the equipment, advanced features, and error probability reduction on user interaction. The design process was participatory, involving users, media professionals, marketers, and people from various cultural and technical backgrounds.

TOMI operates like a public hyperbolic smartphone in urban spaces. The easy interaction invites action to find content and services related to the user's geolocation and diverse local trending information. The interaction requested from users is facilitated by a clean design that triggers emotional responses. This is emphasized by a dual approach targeting both users that interact and those that read and consume ads.

The design project began in Portugal four years ago and in 2016, TOMI was deployed to Brazil, after being available in Lisbon and other cities in Portugal. The design process involved collaborative and adaptive research, with the goal of driving users to find local information. The design team overcame creative, technical, and research challenges, including merging Corporate TV and Mobile, dealing with technological and legal frontiers on user data usage, and finding that the best user interaction design is not always the best practice for users.

In recognition of its innovative design, TOMI was awarded the Golden A' Interface, Interaction and User Experience Design Award in 2017. This award is granted to marvelous, outstanding, and trendsetting creations that reflect the designer's prodigy and wisdom, venerated products and bright ideas that advance art, science, design, and technology, embodying extraordinary excellence and significantly impacting the world with their desirable characteristics.