ecobee | 2021-2023

Designer: ecobee and Tactile Design Teams, Tactile, Seattle, Washington, USA
Manufacturer: ecobee, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium, packaged with an ecobee SmartSensor, is a temperature and humidity monitoring device that transforms the category with advancements to help take care of your comfort, home health, and security needs. Thoughtfully designed features bring you comfort at home and control from anywhere. Delivering savings of up to 26% on heating and cooling costs, Smart Thermostat Premium features air quality monitoring and radar technology. The air quality monitoring calibrates typical air quality levels and provides alerts to any deviations. Historically, thermostats use PIR (passive infrared) to detect occupancy, but radar detects at a wider angle for improved sensing. By using radar, ecobee achieved a perfectly continuous glass lens--even the microphones have been moved to be bottom-facing, so the touch screen and interface are uninterrupted. Like all ecobee products, Smart Thermostat Premium works in harmony with leading smart home ecosystems for full user flexibility.

ecobee’s newest thermostat was designed to evoke a sense of harmony and balance. The design team set out to update and evolve the design language while incorporating ecobee’s environmental considerations and new technologies. Through a rigorous combination of sketching, CAD, rendering, CNC models, 3D printing, user research, and CMF explorations, the team developed a thoughtful design and timeless aesthetic.

The design details included: Smart Thermostat Premium: • Refined and evolved the ecobee’s “squircle” shape which is an exact offset of the display. • Maximized active area of the display for better legibility and larger touch targets. • Glass has cast-in tinting to optimize dead-fronting, and the waterfall edges are softened for both look and feel. • Die-cast zinc body acts as a chassis for robustness, also includes downward-facing mics. • Back integrates a rear-firing speaker, air quality monitoring (intake), and visible fasteners to signal ecobee’s improved design-for-disassembly focus. SmartSensor: • Builds upon a design language that’s approachable anywhere in the home. • A magnetic base for placement on a shelf--expanding your level of comfort throughout the home. • Smart Sensor monitors temperature and occupancy, so the thermostat is not the only source. • Designed with a discreet fresnel lens, blended with the housing. Unique to the Smart Thermostat Premium, the newly integrated radar occupancy sensor and an indoor air quality monitor maximizes comfort without requiring multiple devices. It retains the built-in smart speaker capabilities (choose between Siri or Alexa) and still functions as a hub for ecobee’s smart security system (requires additional hardware and a monthly subscription).

Benefit to users

With up to 26% savings on annual heating and cooling costs and ENERGY STARâ Certified, the Smart Thermostat Premium comes bundled with one ecobee SmartSensor for monitoring temperature and motion in another room of your home. The sensor can be placed in different rooms so your system can maintain a consistent temperature throughout as well as target your preferred temperature to the room you are in versus just heating and cooling wherever the thermostat is located. A notable feature upgrade of Smart Thermostat Premium is a larger screen than ecobee’s previous models—the color LCD touchscreen is a 50% larger, 4-inch offset-squircle. Industrial design and UX blend perfectly with the cooling/heating loop offset-inward from the softened edges of the glass. The larger screen is easier to use with the controls more spread out, making it easier to select correctly. Additionally, Smart Thermostat Premium works in harmony with leading smart home ecosystems including Apple HomeKit, Alexa, and Google Home. Premium also includes Spotify and Bluetooth streaming, hands-free calling and intercom, smoke alarm and detection, intruder alert, vacation scheduling, and pausing AC when a window or door is left open.

Benefit to Client/Brand

From inception, ecobee has strived to improve everyday life, while creating a more sustainable world. Ecobee entered the smart home market offering climate control and lighting products, and they wanted to expand their brand to continue to offer home efficiency solutions. The Smart Thermostat Premium is a home monitoring device that combines premium, timeless aesthetics with smart features and easy scheduling to help save energy. Benefit to Society With sustainability at their core, ecobee’s products are designed to reduce environmental impact by improving home efficiency. All ecobee’s products are designed to counter the culture of technology obsolescence by lasting over ten years, and consistently being improved with new features over the air (OTA). From energy conservation to recyclable packing, ecobee smart thermostats have saved over 27.8TW of energy, which is equal to taking all of the homes in Los Angeles and Chicago off the grid for a year. ecobee products are built to last in your home, not in a landfill, and are software upgradable so you’ll always get the newest features and updates.

Appropriate Aesthetics

Although traditional thermostats use physical buttons or a twisting-action to raise and lower household temperature, ecobee has been perfecting the touch-screen interface since launching ecobee3 in 2014. Smart Thermostat Premium incorporates everything the designers have learned about touch-screen interaction, and the industrial design is built outward from the new interface. The design team worked seamlessly across disciplines, co-developing the new UI and its ID “frame.” the designers wanted the UI to emerge out of pure blackness, with a glowing loop of blue-or-orange serving to confirm that the system was doing its job: that your home was being warmed or cooled. The outside band of the display is just wide enough to accommodate the radar chip, which sits directly beneath the ecobee logotype.