Case Study: Mobile Phones

Corporations usually think they know which business they are in. Yet, managers - and designers, for that matter - often do not realize that what they assume to be knowledge is in fact an assumption, a system of beliefs rooted in history and habit. These belief systems produce symbols and ways of doing things (the size and location of one's office, the rituals involved in reaching a particular person etc.). More interestingly for innovation and design, these belief systems also influence the ways in which people in an organization go about to produce artifacts - products and services. 

In this short case study, mg strategy used design to find out how the future of mobile communications could look like. Imagine a large telecommunications company. This company became big, and global, by producing mobile phone handsets with economies of scale at the right time - when mobile communication was a rapidly expanding  market. Then the market environment starts to change, and the market starts to look strange for managers in this company. Questions are cropping up if the tried-and-tested business model built on economy of scale is still valid. How to figure out what the future might hold in store?  

Mobile phones are interesting devices: they connect by distancing. The sensation of the mobile phone is its ability to create a temporary spatial permanence between moving targets, to realize a paradox: flexible distances. No matter how quickly you are moving, the other is always there. Being reachable means being present in time, yet removed in space. Mobile phones are deeply personal devices which trigger different ways of dealing with the other. Some efforts go into the display of being reachable, other efforts into rituals of being unreachable. 

The problems the company had in dealing with a changing market environment for mobile communication presented a chance for in-house innovators. However, the design function - or rather the way how design was seen there - was part of the problem, not part of the solution. There, design was understood predominantly as a tangible "3D" task with the overall form factor being the focus of attention. It was about "look and feel", and this simply meant that it was all about shapes and colors. The screen and interface, at the time a small part of mobile phones, was considered a minor problem to be dealt with by programmers and graphic designers. The product 'mobile phone" was approached nearly as if it would be a car, with questions of shape and color being at the center of attention. This particular design mindset turned out to be out of tune with the market and contributing to the problems of the company. 

To open up the view for other ways of thinking about mobile phones, I designed three phone concepts in 2004, each representing another angle to think about mobile communication devices: One concept dealt with usage and consumption and focused attention on the afterlife of a phone - the dissolving phone. One concept dealt with user interaction and focused attention on the codes of use in communication devices - the touch-screen network phone. And another concept dealt with 'embodied' aspects of communication, focusing attention on the often overlooked, because problematic, man-machine relationships in communication - the dermal strata phone.

The 'dissolving phone' was a radical design concept to provoke a rethinking of how a mobile phone was supposed to be designed. It questioned the, at the time, taken for granted idea that a mobile phone, although it is a transient object of consumption, has to be designed and produced as if it would be somewhat 'eternal', if only for the time until the contract of the user with the network provider expired. In fact, a product had to represent - or suggest, by design - durability exactly because it is a transient object of consumption. Thus there was no room to consider the actual afterlife of the product and how the phone would disintegrate and decompose. While these thoughts would later become more prominent with 'cradle to cradle', they had been absent at the time, and so we conceived a phone which was designed to disintegrate beautifully, easily and quickly. Made in reinforced jelly, it simply dissolves when put into a glass of water with Alka Seltzer. 

The next concept, the touch-screen network 'connection phone', most accurately described the future of mobile phones in the medium term. While investigating the use of phones, I found that the tangible buttons on mobile phones are directly connected to the historic convention of telephone numbers. Numbers, then, could also be seen as standing in between people who want to connect. Without physical buttons, this phone would allow you to scroll through your network, graphically animated on the screen, with a swipe of your fingers and, by tap, connect you to a network node representing a person in your network. The number is, as an auxiliary information, still on display, but it is not the focus - the focus is on the network and the name. In 2004, this concept included predictions of elements of the iPhone and of Twitter.

The last, also radical, design concept, the 'dermal strata phone', was designed around the hand gesture people make with thumb and index finger when they mean "Let's call each other". Here, the telephone has disappeared as a tangible object. Instead, it is surgically embedded in your hand, just below the outermost skin. An miniaturized speaker is embedded in the thumb and a microphone in the index finger. The very casual relationship we have with electronic devices is here pushed to the next level. We carry and use our mobile phones most of the time close to our bodies. Here, electronics are not only always close to us, they are, in an uncanny way, part of us. As we increasingly see our bodies as instruments to be technically improved upon (just think of plastic surgery and piercing), this concept shows how easily electronics can become part of our bodies.

The answer to the question "which business are you in?" was simple: The company would see itself differently if it would assume to be in the business of communication, not in the business of producing phones. Although the slogan of the company reflected part of this, its mindset was focused on tangible phones and their form factor, not on communication in a wider sense and how it could be enabled by innovative products and services. 

Product-focused mindsets are dangerous - just think about typewriter companies. If they would have thought about themselves not as being in the business of typewriters, but as being in the business of information, they might have seen that computers will at some point in time become better tools of information.