Design an astronaut’s watch

Nasa is appealing to the public for ideas on a smart interface for use on the ISS.

A screengrab of the Freelancer.com website, on which Nasa is calling on the public to submit smartwatch interface designs, for ISS crew.

Cape Canaveral, Florida // Nasa has made an open call on Freelancer.com to ask the public to create a smartwatch interface for astronauts to use on the International Space Station (ISS). It looks as if those famous Omega Speedmasters might not be cutting it any more.

This contest is open to anyone and to date, five entries are in progress, according to Freelancer.com.

The scope of the project is high level, asking entrants to create wireframe images to show what the apps would look like for displaying crew agendas, warnings and alerts, communication status and various timers.

The priorities are legibility on small screens, innovative representations of common data, and appropriate feedback to interactions.

The guidelines also stipulate that designers should use Samsung’s Gear 2 smartwatch as a hardware reference for their creations.

There is no stipulation that participants need to have the development skills to implement their designs, opening up the challenge to many more designers. Anyone interested has four weeks to enter, and the winning designer will be awarded US$1,500 (Dh5,500).

While the prize money might not sound overwhelming, the resume line item and pride are likely to be motivation enough for those considering it.

The contest is an initiative of the Nasa Tournament Lab, a division of the Centre of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation, a branch that tries to bring technology and ideas from the private sector into the government agency.

As of now, independently developing something like this for the Apple Watch is impossible because of Apple’s restrictions. And Nasa’s choice of Samsung’s Gear 2 for the hardware reference is interesting, considering the common use of iPads to run operating procedures on the space station.

Switching even small parts of the station over to a new operating system does not sound like a meagre challenge.

This year, Nasa also revealed that it is working on computerised glasses for astronauts.