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Last Words
Think before you talk
By The Economist
16/01/2003
The mobile phone is a paradoxical device. Its primary function is social: to enable its owner to communicate with other people. At the same time, though, using a mobile phone can seem profoundly anti-social, not least to people in the immediate vicinity. In restaurants, theatres and museums, on trains, or even standing in the supermarket checkout queue, there is no escape from chirping and bleeping phones, nor from the inane conversations of their owners. Last year Philip Reed, a New York councillor, proposed a law that would prohibit the use of mobile phones in “places of public performance”, such as theatres, art galleries and concert halls, punishable by a $50 fine. But his proposal has been derided as unenforceable. Might a technological approach to taming the mobile phone, and the behaviour of its users, be more successful?
Crispin Jones, Graham Pullin and their colleagues at Ideo, an industrial-design company, think the answer is yes. (Ideo is responsible for designing such products as the Palm V pocket computer, the original Microsoft mouse, the TiVo personal video-recorder and the world's most high-tech dressing rooms, at Prada in New York.) As part of an internal research project, the team designed five prototype “social mobiles” which modify their users' behaviour to make it less disruptive.
For example, the first phone, called SoMo1, gives its user a mild electric shock, depending on how loudly the person at the other end is speaking. This encourages both parties to speak more quietly, otherwise the mild tingling becomes an unpleasant jolt. Such phones, the designers suggest archly, could be given to repeat offenders who persistently disturb people with intrusive phone conversations.
SoMo2 is a phone intended for use in situations (such as a hushed art gallery) where speaking is inappropriate. Manipulating a joystick and a pair of saxophone keys controls a speech synthesiser that produces an expressive range of vowel sounds for non-verbal communication: “Hmm? Yeah.” The third phone, SoMo3, resembles a small, clarinet-like musical instrument. Dialling is done by holding down combinations of keys and blowing; tunes replace phone numbers. “The public performance that dialling demands acts as a litmus test of when it is appropriate to make a call,” say the designers.
SoMo4 replaces ringtones with a knocking sound: to make a call, select the number and knock on the back of the phone, as you would on somebody's door. The recipient of the call hears this knock (cleverly encoded and relayed via a short text-message) and decides how urgent the call is. How you knock on a door, says Mr Pullin, is freighted with meaning: there is a world of difference between tentative tapping and insistent hammering. SoMo5 has a catapult-like device that can be used to trigger intrusive sounds on a nearby user's phone, anonymously alerting them that they are speaking too loudly.
None of these phones is intended as a commercial product; the design team simply hopes to provoke discussion. It seems to be working. The project has just won a prize from the Agency of Cultural Affairs in Japan, perhaps the country where both social etiquette and mobile phones are taken more seriously than anywhere else. And behind these silly-sounding phones is a serious point. Much is made of “user-centric” design, says Mr Pullin, but in the case of mobile phones, the people surrounding the user need to be considered too
Read the full article at The Economist
Links:
Wired story 05/02/03
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