Design
Becoming super-human with your mobile sixth sense
By Mike on 27 May 2009
LONDON, UK – Today we’re excited to be at Nokia’s London base for a rare behind-closed-doors design event dubbed The Inside Story.
Alastair Curtis, Head of Design at Nokia, has just introduced the themes of today’s event and the things we can expect to find out during our time here. Alastair shared a design insight that your mobile is becoming more of a “sixth sense”, equipping you with “super-human” abilities. Read on to find out more about this concept that is being explored by the Nokia design team, and what else we’ll be reporting back on.
Now this notion of your mobile providing your with pseudo super-human abilities might sound a little exaggerated, but the evolution of context aware services is arguably a powerful sixth sense that, as Alastair’s design colleague Bill Sermon mentioned, equips you with a new sort of “peripheral vision” that enables you to see things you perhaps weren’t expecting. And as Alastair explains this “frees you from the complexity of technology to let you look up and enjoy the world around you”. This new breed of mobile behaviour is being investigated and developed with the design ambition being to create interfaces that are absolutely instinctive and don’t keep trapped looking at a screen – instead of say how you might find yourself immersed in a desktop computer screen, the Nokia design team is looking at ways to make your mobile phone screen a glance-at tool to inspire you to spend your time immersed in your physical world, aided with digitized help from your handset.
The concept of your mobile device equipping you with a sixth sense is certainly an interesting one. And new methods of interaction, and interface tools such as Nokia’s new homescreen, are a couple of the core threads that will be explored in more detail today.
Later on we’ll also be speaking with a number of key designers at Nokia (including the Head of Nseries design, responsible for the upcoming N97), and rolling out our video interviews with them throughout the week.
Plus, stay tuned for more stories and photos from today’s The Inside Story event, coming soon.
Photo from laverrue
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- Nokia gesture design video (and live research in London)
Tags | Alastair Curtis, Bill Sermon, Context aware, Head of design, Location-based services, Nokia design, sixth sense, The Inside Story
May 27th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Ooooh. This is something that I recently wrote about on my blog about. But yes, this is exactly where mobile device interaction needs to be on all levels for users. If the friction to engage the world is reduced, then we become better users of the tech, and effectively can better (positively) change the world around us.
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