The Beauty of Simplicity
Imagine a phone made from cotton. Soft, pliable and light , yet never compromising on power or performance. The Soft Phone concept by designer Qian Jiang takes what we know about electronic cellulose structures and squeezes every last ounce of performance out of it. Literally!
The is a series of discs with electronic fabric stretched in between. The interface uses a combination of tactile gestures like squeezing to hang-up and touch which detects a deformation on the surface to register input. The fibers are fine enough and optically clear allowing light energy to pass thru to display simple contextual menus. Whenever you need a full QWERTY just unfurl the collapsible structure. The cell antenna, battery, camera, and micro electronics are contained inside a tiny clip which itself is made of soft, squeezable, stress-reducing silica.
March 25th, 2008 at 2:30 am
Cute, but this is the sort of thing that makes me really appreciate the differences between design, invention and innovation. I can’t explain why, but I’d bet a small amount that this goes nowhere, though it does represent a thought-provoking line od design. Maybe that’s all the justification you need to work on stuff like this. Interesting that the standard QWERTY is dominant that even the functionally useful diff, the Dvorak keyboard, never dislodged it.