Editor’s note: This article was written for and originally published on Adobe’s XD blog, Inspire.
“Human beings need to touch, feel, show, share, and new technologies tend to cut them from such fundamental needs. It finally made an impact, and this is probably one of the main reasons behind the tiredness and rejection of technology you start to get from early adopters.” – Laurent Haug, The Early Adopters Crisis
The mobile landscape is finally changing. With smartphone penetration at 20%, the phone’s promise as a mini portable computer is being realized and we are increasingly using phones to virtually connect, often choosing text instead of voice; Facebook or Twitter over email. But, as our virtual interactions increase, a greater value is concurrently being placed on our real, physical connections. The most compelling applications will be those which infuse the virtual realm into our physical environment, creating synergies for tangible experiences and exchanges.
In the UK, postcard sales have risen by 30%. In 2007 Billboard reported a similar growth in vinyl record sales citing listeners desired a “warmer, richer” sound. Ranging from conference presentations at TED to a national Dentyne marketing campaign to “Make Face Time”, more and more people are “yearning for tangibility” according to the New York Times. Throughout history we are prone to backlash against our current realities. The grass is always greener somewhere else and nostalgia causes us to long for a seemingly happier, and in this case, more physically connected past. The answer is not to move away from technology, but rather to accept the current social challenge and design experiences which, as Renny Gleeson states, “make us more human, not less.”
How do we design meaningful tangible experiences? While I champion much of the philosophy behind MIT Media Lab and other related schools of thought, the results are still too farfetched to really meet our current social physical needs on a large scale. The answer isn’t to embed ordinary objects with technology, but rather to design our devices to encourage us to engage with our physical environments and each other. Contrary to many tangible media projects, the mobile phone is clearly identifiable as a technical device and it’s potential as a shared object has yet to be fully realized. Simple examples like pointing the phone outward to show someone a photo immediately creates a shared context resulting in a gratifying physical exchange. How can we push our existing personal devices to reach a whole new social level?
Let’s start with 5 principles we can follow. Like Adam Greenfield said in Everyware, “these principles are necessary but not sufficient: they constitute not an end, but a beginning.”
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