Ziasheng's Visual Research Blog (UCD)

Nokia 888 Concept, by Tamer Nakisci, 2007, Istanbul

taken from "http://www.nokia888.com/"

taken from "http://www.nokia888.com/"

taken from "http://www.nokia888.com/"

taken from "http://www.nokia888.com/"

taken from "http://www.nokia888.com/"

A brief introduction…

The concept is a phone that can be bend in any shape the user wants.This allows it to be carried wherever the user want; around the wrist,in the chest pocket or in the bag.

By sending each other messages that contain emotions, the phone canchange its shape to fit the message. It can for example change its shapeto a heart when someone sends his love towards the person with the phone.

My thoughts…

Good…

I think by sending messages to each other in the form of changing shapes, this phone adds a certain level of element of surprise towards both the parties. This added function allows user to talk without words, and so it is especially useful when people want to communicate to each other but do not know how to express out themselves verbally.

Also, it is good in the way that it allows people to personalize their own forms for the phone and record them. For example, if a person have set his/her phone in silent mode, he/she might not be able to notice the phone ringing, so he/she can choose to set the phone to change to a very obvious particular form so as to allow himself/herself to notice the phone ringing easily. By letting the user to determine his/her phone’s form, it fits the user according to the best way he/she wants the phone’s shape to change to.

Lastly, the emotions that the user want to express to another person will be particularly visually pleasing and attractive compared to just speaking over the phone with a tone that might not be so well understood. This idea is good that it make use of both the sense of sight and hear to receive the feedback(the changing form) on the phone.

Bad…

This concept is not so good in the sense that people might abuse theunique feature that it has and record offensive shapes to represent acertain provoking message. The simple form of this phone makes itparticular easy for people to change the phone’s form to something thatis visually unpleasant, so it might not be good to a certain extent forpeople to change the phone’s shape at will.

What I think can be improved…

The phone is designed in the way that it is flexible and can be bend or roll, but the size is more or less being restricted to the original dimensions of this phone model. So, the future phones can be designed in a more flexible way(e.g. able to deform the phone’s shape). In this case, the overall size of the phone can be able to extend to a larger one to accomodate more interfaces and also the phone’s form can then be changed to a wider variety.

Video taken from “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3dF44XtHek”

What others thought of it…

User Anna commented : “Ok everyone goes wow and woes, but we never know how good it will be, they always say(never judge the book by its cover)so lets wait and see.it looks very good and clever, but you never know guyz….lets keep our fingers crosssed….i really really hope that it will turn out to be perfct,coz it will be the answer to our prayers for a perfect cel-phone.”

User Kahoneez commented : “This is an awesome design, for the first fact it does something no other cell can do. It can bend and turn into various shapes and forms, which is obviously serving it’s functional requirements and size is everything, meaning small or thin is IN. I would like to see a variety of colors, that would make interest even greater and maybe some type of ART work and if I see the pic correctly, it looks as if it is wrapping around a wrist, which is absolutely amazing as it will serve as a great functional feature, with the addition of more of an ARTISTIC outside, maybe a CAMO look, Flowers, this is really going to catch the eye of many people. In my opinion this cell has great potential to make the designer some serious denero.”

User Thakshila Ranaweera commented : “This device will revolutionalise the mobile technology. The Future is here. Its interesting to see at what sort of a price it will be when launched, only time will tell.”

Conclusion…

This Nokia 888 is a very visually appealing device that represent the generation of phones of the modern era and it highlight a number of new and interesting possible ways that us, human beings interact between one and another in the future. I think that the best feature of the phone is that it allow people to control the form instead of letting the form to be “dead” and “still” and we have no control or whatsoever to represent a form to a phone’s function(e.g. a half-curled shape to represent a picked-up call).