Phone users are experiencing extreme anxiety revolving around the phone battery life. As a designer, how can we modify the battery’s appearance to reduce user anxiety? Inspired by the behavioral research conducted by B.F. Skinner – I wanted to focus on human’s response to conditioning. 

Specifically looking at the aspects of positive and negative reinforcement. Critical questions I kept in mind were:

How do we reward users for letting the battery die?
How do we re-imagine the battery to encourage users to let their phones die with minimal anxiety?

As Apple is pushing the use of widgets, it made sense to approach the re-imagining of the battery in that space. After some ideation and sketches - I landed on the concept of magnification and clarification. I experimented with various photo treatments to see which effects distorted the image but still indicated that there was something to reveal. I tested different blurring, pixelation, and distortion effects.

I had seven individuals look at the Gaussian blur, Duo-halftone, and mosaic effects. 5 thought the Duo-halftone was the most effective, and mosaic and Gaussian had one vote each.