The Wasilly Chair is an icon of the The Bauhaus Movement. It is a symbol of the defining question for which Bauhaus artists and designers struggled: how do you reconcile machine and art?
60Hertz is driven by a similar question: What’s the unity between energy asset maintenance and accessible User Interface design? The answer lies within our philosophy.
Aesthetic currents shaped 60Hertz’s vision to innovate on User Interface design (UI) in maintenance software. Our founding team was dissatisfied by the low visual IQ most maintenance software on the market offered. So we dove in and crafted our own accessible, low-literacy, visually appealing accessible niche. 60Hertz brings a better user interface to maintenance software.
Back to the chair for a moment. The Bauhaus movement was fundamentally a reaction to the 2nd Industrial Revolution in Europe in the late 1800s, and design that was limited to mechanized production. A young architect named Walter Gropius launched a crucible for what became an inter-disciplinary movement that drew creatives from across Europe. The Bauhaus influence has echoed spectacularly for 100 years now. Reason and beauty are key. The simpler the better.
Those artists and designers who flocked to the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany between 1919 and its ultimate closure in 1933 felt called: the industrialization of life demanded a new lens: it was artists and engineers who should evolve a better world for everyone, not just the engineers and their manufacturing plants.
Artists and engineers!
These underscore our vision for 60Hertz’s design, and the new version we bring to market this month. We bring forth a UI grounded in aesthetic intelligence, and rooted in interdisciplinary thinking, in service to the ideal of dignified work for all, to people and the renewable energies in their care.
Humanity’s aesthetic IQ is increasing. Tomorrow’s workforce, even in the most remote parts of the planet, will have spent most of their lives absorbing content of vastly more aesthetic intelligence than their parents or grandparents. From Instagram to bus advertising, humans are unconsciously honing their perception of form, balance, composition, and color. We have new ideas of what looks good.
People are wired to respond to visual harmony. A clean layout gives breathing room, especially when the tasks you are assigned may be complicated or slightly above your skill set. This is what maintenance software with a better user interface means.
Today’s maintenance software User Experience designers must bring more to their work than Excel tables and buttons that say “NEXT”.
Instead, resumes for UI/UX Engineers like 60Hertz’s Casey Eickhoff list roles in the art non-profit, and agency worlds. She is a hybrid of design and development, and that’s a good thing.
Casey crafted each screen of the 60Hertz App, from the precise hue of the navigation topbar, to the size of our default profile picture, to the color-indicators marking users’ progress through their maintenance work. It’s unusual for a venture at our stage to have a dedicated team member focused on UX; achieving our low-literacy accessibility value proposition demands that commitment to users.
Good design is a salve to all of us. As software sews itself stich by stich more deeply into our activities, let us technologists confer art. Especially in the industrialized, mechanized worlds of work.
