Nick Jones

Yesterday I went so a ceramics show. I like ceramics because it’s a craft that – when done well – combines beauty and utility. One of my favourite quotes is from a British designer called William Morris, who said:

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

Morris knew what he was talking about, over a century after his death people are still using his fabric and wallpaper designs. Not everyone at the show was up to William Morris standards, but when faced with 80 different craftsmen it’s hard not to find something you like.

Sadly the same isn’t always true in the mobile industry. I wish more mobile handset designers remembered Morris’s words because we have seen some really horrible looking devices over the last few years. Remember the B & O “Serene”, or maybe the Tag Heuer “Meridiist” which to my eyes is a €3,200 doorstop?. And what about the Virgin “lobster”, that looked as if it had been infested with a strange excrescence that could pop at any moment to reveal an alien predator. It’s no wonder that Apple does so well with style-conscious buyers when you look at many of the alternatives.

And when you get past the external appearance many mobile user interfaces aren’t an aesthetic joy either. Windows Mobile and S60 really need facelifts for example. This is a more serious issue than it seems, because the appearance of user interfaces isn’t just important for the “wow” factor, but has a huge impact on user satisfaction, and sometimes influences less obvious areas like supportability. Research has shown that if other factors are equal, interfaces which look better are rated as being easier to use. One proposed explanation is that when we’re looking at something pleasing our brains are more relaxed and we are more likely to experiment to find our way around problems rather than getting stressed and abandoning the product.

As I walked around the show yesterday I wondered about the intersection of craftsmen and mobile phones. Today if you have enough money you can find jewellers happy to re-engineer your mobile to replace its case with one covered in diamonds. But maybe in the future TI or Qualcomm will put a phone on a single chip or PCB in a form that others can customise. In a decade I might be wandering around a show looking at exquisite hand crafted handsets by imaginative designers, or maybe watching a TV program called Pimp my Mobile.