Cell phones are too small…
As a reaction to my father’s constant complaints about too many features and too little size, I thought that a cell-phone would be a good choice of object to de-technologize. Since my proposal occurred in the form of a power point talk, I decided to post some of the images I showed and mention some of the points that I made.
First, cell phones seem to be designed with ergonomics as an afterthought. they seem to have always been made in unweildy and uncomfortable shapes. Below are acouple of “early” designs. The “brick” phone from the eighties is actually a product that can be purchased today. It is advertised as crappy as a phone, but pretty sturdy as a door-stop.
Here’s a little phone timeline from the last few years. You’ll see that not much changes.
My first idea was to put the guts of cell phone in an old rotary phone. Kind of unweildy on one hand, but certainly fits this concept of”human scale” we discussed in class. Anyway, it’s already been done and here is the product (available for about $300 on sparkfun.com)
Finally, I thought it might be a good compromise to fit all the phone stuf into the handset from an old phone or payphone.
that’s pretty much what I talked about.