Spouse Lock for Nest Thermostat

Happy Saturday!

Living in California for the last decade has made me realize what a luxury heating and air-conditioning are. The days of living in an apartment that would get up to 90 degrees in the summer in Culver City are ones I hope to never re-live.

I digress. I now have a thermostat I can easily set to whatever temperature I choose. Well… whatever my wife and I choose. Thankfully, we live in harmony and both like the house at the same temp.

However, there’s gotta be people out there who are locked in mortal combat with their partner over control of the thermostat. This gave me an idea, “what if you could put your spouse in a timeout from using the thermostat?”

Originally I mocked up the visual below:

After a little iteration I wound up posting the image you can see at the very top of this newsletter because the form factor of the Nest is so iconic and it felt easier to grasp.

Hardware design is fun. This brought back memories of designing A/C unit interfaces earlier in my career. It was a great exercise in creating constrained systems that rely almost exclusively on typography (very little flexibility when it comes to color and iconography with certain types of hardware).

I can imagine the strife a feature like this would cause, but it’d also be pretty funny.

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