All Products are Cell Phones
A real quickie: I chatted with Jim Wicks tonight after his presentation as part of the Tech Epoch series at the Japan Society. He’s the design director for Motorola, dealing exclusively with small, networked cell phones that want to shed their physical forms and become no more than a set of behaviors as soon as technology will allow.
We design very different things, but I realized that treating the shoes, teapots, and other non-electric things I love as if they were networked devices could produce designs that are particularly sensitive to their environments. Although these products are silent, they’re connected by the user’s daily experience; the things a person uses or encounters each day become nodes in a very tangible network. Like colors on a painting, no product exists in isolation, although they’re often designed as if they do. More on this idea soon.
Leave a Comment