Matt's Blog

Tactile Tech

June 14th, 2006

While I was testing my new internet connection, I came across this interesting design project called Allmyfriends by Jack Godfrey Wood. The project, with Nokia, was to design future mobile phones and this particular entry does away with the usual “buttons and screen” view of the mobile phone. Instead, contacts are represented by tactile “beads” which are squeezed to call that person. To give someone your contact details you just give them a bead, allowing them to associate a physical object with you.

This is a neat twist on the idea of a contact. Currently we have numbers, which is good for writing down, storing in computers, sending to other people, but mobile manufacturers have to dress this up by allowing you to also store names, pictures and caller-dependent ringtones. Hiding the contact info inside a simple physical token allows the human brain, which is very good at recognising and interacting with real objects, to catalogue the information itself. Allowing people to generate, customise and distribute the physical tokens themselves makes the process of exchanging contact details a more human social interaction – the tradition of gift exchanging is extremely old.

This is a similar idea to the Personal Area Network, which could allow people to exchange business cards simply by shaking hands, in that it attempts to hide the exchange of computer-readable data behind a human social interaction.

Unfortunately, allmyfriends suffers from two major drawbacks: the creation of the physical tokens and the ability to forward contact details without the physical object. Firstly, the physical tokens must be unique (or very nearly unique) so that they can be associated with a single individual, but this is incompatible with methods of mass-production. Possibly, the tokens could be sold in a few basic forms and customised. The second problem is for when you don’t want to give a token, either because you’re giving your contact details to someone you want no social interaction with (e.g: a company) or someone who is not physically present (e.g: over e-mail). For this, I guess we could keep the current system of identifying numbers.

I guess these problems are not insurmountable and I wish Jack Godfrey luck if he chooses to further develop these very cool ideas.

Entry Filed under: Tech