Cette bulle transparente faisant office de salle de bain mobile Transparent Mobile Bubble sera présentée au salon ISH à Francfort du 12 au 16 mars 2013. Développée par German Sanitation Industry en collaboration avec Messe Frankfurt, ce projet veut selon eux combler le besoin de liberté et de relaxation.
In the world of tech design, bigger seems to be better. The more people you can reach, the more you can broadcast, the more successful your app. And yet the root of the mobile phone—or the phone more generally—has always been about one-on-one conversation. It was relatively recently that we could send a blast to more than a few people at a time through apps like Twitter and Foursquare.
Which is why I was intrigued by a recent piece from Jenna Wortham in the New York Times noting what’s happened now that our mobile experiences have scaled:
As these media have matured and more of our colleagues, former flings, in-laws and friends have migrated to them, our use of them has changed. We’ve become better at choreographing ourselves and showing our best sides to the screen, capturing the most flattering angle of our faces, our homes, our evenings out, our loved ones and our trips.
Dubbing this experience “success theater,” she goes on to note apps that are designed for more intimacy, like Snapchat or Facebook Poke. After years of being encouraged to gather as many followers and friends as possible, many users are swinging in the opposite direction.
Which got me thinking about two apps that have picked up steam as of late. Both of them—WhatsApp and WeChat—focus on simple sharing for small groups or individuals. You could call them, reductively, complex SMS systems, but what they allow is much broader. From sharing videos and pics to even voice memos, they make facilitate one-on-one exchanges between friends, rather than blasts and curated photos designed for public consumption. The ability to create small groups means that circles of friends can easily chat and share ideas, with all the multimedia features of a Twitter or Facebook and none of the pressure to perform.
WhatsApp seems to be more popular with my American, European and African friends, whereas WeChat, developed by China’s Tencent, is clearly dominant in China, and perhaps other parts of Asia. It’s not a surprise to me that they’ve caught on, and I suspect more and more apps like them will start popping up. If the latter decade was focused on scaling up social media and watching sites like Facebook enter the mainstream, maybe this decade is about designing for intimacy, designing for the social experiences we want to share just with a handful of friends.
It’s time to get serious about mobile phone radiation – and what better way to do it than with a lovely design concept to completely do away with it? This is the “ER”, a smartphone that works with a Bluetooth-connected detachable microphone/earbud combo. When it’s docked, the earbud charges up. When it’s out, it’s instantly connected wirelessly to your phone.
This device was made not just for those people who love to keep their phone in their pocket when they talk for fashion, but for those worried about the radiation emitted by phones on a regular basis. For them, there’s this surprisingly reasonable docked earbud-in-phone concept – have at it!
Designers: National Chiao Tung University
–
Yanko Design
Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
Yanko Design Store – We are about more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the YD Store!
(This Smartphone Packs a Hidden Earbud was originally posted on Yanko Design)
Related posts:
 |  |
LG Touch – Smartphone with raised touch screenLG Mobile Design Competition 2012 / Grand Prize / Tokyo 20.11.2012LG Touch is a state-of-the-art smartph..
Designer Moon Myounghak has made a lovely effort in a very real way (conceptual on the verge of reality) in creating a case that allows the iPhone to become a touchkey phone. WIth the keys this case creates for the iPhone, you’ve got a very physical set of keys accented by a touchscreen that contains five icons across. In other words, this wouldn’t be allowed by Apple as it stands here, but with a hacked iPhone you’d have gold.
Have a peek at what this physical case with real physical buttons would bring you and your iPhone and let us know – would you do it? Do you desire the physical set of keys of yesteryear to keep the iPhone linked to the past? Or could you never, ever keep away from the full touchscreen experience?
Designer: Moon Myounghak
–
Yanko Design
Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
Yanko Design Store – We are about more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the YD Store!
(iPhone touchkeys become real was originally posted on Yanko Design)
Related posts:
| |
Tokyo Designers Week wrapped up a couple weeks ago, but NTT Docomo’s remarkable 20th Anniversary Exhibition Future lives on online, supplemented by Japan-based forum member designobot’s brief exhibition recap:
The onsite event was a wall of 20 years of smartphones going left to right from oldest to newest.
From the left were the black and gray brick types that were as boring as the more recent phones on the far right, black slabs. Right of the middle (early-mid 2000s) was where all the action was at. Phone in the picture, wristomo, was 2003.
Also interesting to note is the delay on the Japanese market for smartphones, mainly from 2010 on.
I wasn’t able to find any images of the actual exhibition, but thankfully the exhibition website is as comprehensive as it is straightforward. The twelve-image thumbnail layout gives a nice sense of handset evolution over time—by 1998 there are a couple pages worth of phones per year, with the occasional oddball form factor among the mostly undifferentiated hardware. By the flip-phone-dominated mid-2000s, the otherwise decontextualized renderings somehow conjure typologies of everything from kitchen appliances to building façades or perhaps robots. (The fact that there are no images of open flip-phones, regretable though it may be, reinforces this uncanny uniformity between the devices.)
Sign o’ the times? In the old days, corporations demonstrated largesse in times of disaster by sending in trucks loaded with canned soup and blankets. But at a press conference today, Mayor Bloomberg announced AT&T is sending special hotspot trucks to NYC, to help alleviate the crippled communications systems left in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Hooked up to the satellite grid, the self-contained trucks will spray both Wi-Fi and cellular in a radius around them, and also offer charging stations that passersby can use to gas up their mobiles.
The Mayor was not specific, but I did a little digging and these trucks are presumably the “Satellite COLT (Cell on Light Truck)” vehicles you see pictured here. They’re part of AT&T’s Network Disaster Recovery Team, in which the company’s invested over half a billion dollars. The team, which has been quietly doing exercises and delivering global disaster relief since 1992, consists of engineers, technicians and “a fleet of more than 320 self-contained equipment trailers and support vehicles that house the same equipment and components as an AT&T data-routing or voice-switching center.” It’s kind of cool, something like a Special Forces unit for the telecommunications industry:
The MyKidPad exclusively on Kickstarter. A lightweight and protective case, transforming the iPad 2 and 3 into a portable tool for gami..
Go back to school in high design
As design students head to school, they’d be wise to equip themselves with on-the-go supplies that embody the functional beauty of the larger concepts of the field. These five objects take creative scholars or simply those with an eye for good design from dorm to desk, on campus and…
Continue Reading…
I know the tech companies are doing their best to come out with a mouse that is sleek and compact enough to compliment a laptop. However I am sure most of you will agree with me that a full bodied mouse is what our hands crave, when we work one with a laptop. So to address the issue or portability and keep with the demand of a fully functional mouse, we have here the Flat CD Mouse Concept. When its flat-packed it fits into the CD ROM drive and when you fold it (origami style), it converts into a fully functional mouse. Love it and want it NOW!
The Flat CD Mouse is a 2012 iF Design Talents entry.
Designer: Taewon Hwang
–
Yanko Design
Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
Yanko Design Store – We are about more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the YD Store!
(Flat Pack Mouse was originally posted on Yanko Design)
Related posts:
| |
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
