Interaction design

Although this design by Tamer Nakisci (his site is down) is already three years old, it is still actual this day. He won the design competition of Nokia with this concept phone.

Concept description

The concept is a phone that can be bend in any shape you want. This allows it to be carried wherever you want; around your wrist, in your chest pocket or in your bag. By sending each other messages that contain emotions the phone can change its shape to fit the message. It can for example change its shape to a hart when someone sends his love towards that person.

Sensitive products

The concept shows to which direction ‘industrial design’ can go in the near future. Often we regard products as blocks that communicate with us through interfaces by only relaying ‘the message’. In the future and with this concept, products will become more sensitive to the content of the message and how this message is delivered.

Now matter what the content is of a ‘short text message’ it will always be delivered in the same way. It makes sense that you want to receive your messages from your best friend in a different way then messages from your parents. The same counts for the priority and ringtone of incoming calls; a call from your best friend who calls you five times a day is less important then a call from your boss. And it is logical that when your best friend calls you the phone does not ring but vibrate because it is less important.

Context sensitive

Besides being sensitive to who calls you and how it should notify of this call, phones will be context sensitive as well. If you are in a noisy terrace the phones’ ringtone should be louder then when you are in a theater. This prevents many people from being embarrassed when they forgot to switch off their phone in the theater. (article continues below)

Concept phone

This concept phone is technically in many ways a bridge to far, but it has some promising elements (I hate the word features as it implies ‘functions’ nobody really uses). Colors and visuals support the message of ‘short text messages’. Without reading the text the goal of the message is clear. And what we like the most is that the phone also can convey a message by the shape of the phone. It enhances the experience of receiving an SMS quite radically. Now we think hey, let’s have a look who is sending me an SMS after our beep beep of the phone. With the concept phone you see the phone changing its shape and you watch with great attention to what it is trying to tell you.

It is nice that you can carry your phone wherever you want but fur us the main advantage of this concept phone is how it changes interaction between phone and user.

Via Dino Dream and Yanko