Nanny Venetia. Your personal nanny in the city

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Smartphone App concept and design by Francesca Muratore, Marta Patti, Helena Principato

October 2011- January 2012

Nanny Venetia is a smartphone application which reassures parents when they let their little children play unsupervised in Venice’s campi (squares) for a short time. Thanks to the app, they can monitor their child’s position and ask for help from other parents if their child leaves the selected campo. In this way, the application creates a sort of community, united by a desire for their children’s safety.

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Concept development

Since the first brainstorming, we made storyboards to define the basic actions and the possible situations of our application, from the selection of the “safe area” (the campo), to the borderline case when the lost child receives help from another parent.

We imagine that our application could be used for a short time by parents, maybe when they need to go to the supermarket. During this time the parent entrust their child to the app, which uses signals from the child’s bracelet to check their presence in the campo.

If your child leaves the “safe area”, you can ask help from other parents who have the application.

The helper receives your help request and can decide to accept or not. If she accepts immediately she visualizes your position and your child’s on the Nanny Venetia map.

With the application the parent can call the helper and visualize her position on the map in order to retrieve her child.

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App Design and Prototype

The App logo

Nanny Venetia is a big “nanny” that takes care of children when parents leave them for a short time in the safe area of a Venetian campo (square). We created a logo to represent it metaphorically.

Venice, sometimes symbolized as a fish because of the city’s shape, keeps an eye on children left in the campi. The graphic combination of fish and eye also creates a sort of cap, reminiscent of a housekeeper’s bonnet.

This logo is composed of lots of animated little balls which represent children as floating balloons. As well as animating the logo, balloons are always present in our application to represent to children of the age range we considered (from 5 to 9): their density on the map represents how many children are currently in the campo, and their colour shows their age – the lightest represent 5-year-olds; the darkest green, the oldest ones. All this information is obtained by the devices worn by the children. But each child, for the stakeholders, is anonymous.

Icons on the map

On the map there are a lot of icons with different meanings.
As we said, the small blu moving balls represent the infographic of the children who are playing in the Venice campo in real time.

Other icons on the map, are the user’s ones (a parent) and his child’s ones.

In our application the role of the user and the stakeholder is interchangeable, because the hypothetical helper is also a user. Therefore the helper visualizes the map exactly as the parent whom child went out from the campo, but with some few variances.

Designing the colors palette, we was inspired by blue and green chromatisms of the Venice lagoon. We used this colors on the most significant parts of the application: the logo and the infographic on the map, that represent the identity and the recognizability of Nanny Venitia.
For the map we used neutral colors as beige and whith, with the target of creating a neutral and gentle base for the other icons on the screen. Other icons are in the app are designed using the complementary color of blue-green, in order to have an immediate contrast for the visibility.

To create the graphic style of our work we used the Pluto Medium font, designed by Hannes von Döhren in 2012. Its large x-height allows it to perform well in small sizes, like on smartphone screens.