Internet-connected poster turns weather into wall art

Smartphones have allowed us all sorts of luxuries of convenience, including ordering food with the press of a button, watching Netflix on the go, and checking the weather a million times a day.

The downside of convenience is that we can’t seem to extricate ourselves from compulsively consulting our shiny touchscreens. The Melbourne-based design studio Typified has a solution, at least for checking the weather: Replace your touchscreen with another screen.

Typified

The studio recently launched a Kickstarter for the “weather poster,” a wall-mounted poster that displays the current day’s weather, no swiping and tapping required. The poster has a tiny computer that connects to a home’s Wi-Fi network and pulls in information about the current weather.

Typified

The poster, which is screen-printed with smart ink, is deliberately simple in its design. It displays the weather in four hour increments—8am, 12pm, 4pm and 8pm—with clean icons that include cloudy, sunny, or precipitation.

The data isn’t nearly as robust as a weather app that has radars and predicts when precipitation will start down to the minute, but it does accomplish one major feat: It gives you permission to keep your phone in your pocket for just a little longer. And for those with the opposite problem of constantly forgetting to check the weather, the Typified poster may just be mesmerizing enough to make you look.