Today during lunch my dear friend and colleague, Kate Rutter, made another brilliant statement that inspired me. We were talking about how exciting it is to be working in mobile right now and to be part of defining what will be next. Kate said she thought part of the problem today is that people think of mobile in terms of handsets. She predicted in 10 years, we will probably think of mobile in the way we think of transit – a host of options and ways of doing things in a mobile context.

Kate’s assessment and prediction seems spot on to me. It made me think about how our focus on handsets as the defining characteristic of “mobile” limits us. Because we focus so much on the handset, most mobile phones are dying under their own weight. They have become Frankenstein devices; features and functions kluged onto the old 1-1 communication device model.

We’re so focused on the object – the handset - the “phone”.

How we lust after our little phones. Even the way mobile devices are sold and merchandised reflects our strange attraction and interest in the physical form of the object.

Unfortunately handsets today do not speak the power of what mobility enables. I’m convinced that in the future, mobile devices will need to speak their power – their very form will need to communicate what they can do and are for… and that will take many forms beyond the handset.

What forms will they take? Today I thought about an ideation exercise Kate designed during our last project that explored the idea of mobile phones being more like wands in the world. What i found interesting about this exercise was that it forced our team to think about how the physical form of the object would inform the types of interactions that could be possible in a mobile context. What if a mobile device had the form factor of a magnifying lens… what kind of affordances and intuitive interactions does that offer?

What I truly love about the idea of the “mobile device as a wand” is how it speaks to the need to re-think our relationship and expectations of mobile devices. Today, a mobile device is an object that demands our attention. It rings, it beeps, it pulls us into the tiny screen and demands that we navigate application structures to do the stuff we want to do. Even holding a device – we look down at it and often need to disengage with the world around us during use.

What if a mobile device was like a wand?

A wand’s relationship to humans and the physical world are completely different than a mobile devics. A wand interacts with the environment, they make us give deference to the world around us and to each other. People wave wands and surprising and wonderful things happen. A wand doesn’t demand our attention, it waits for us and is there for us when we need it. A wand choreographs processes and interactions. A wand isn’t complicated – it is intuitive and is connected to our desires. It can almost read our mind. More importantly – the wand’s form factor is … well, it’s a stick. It’s boring. There is nothing interesting about the form factor of a wand… it’s what the wand enables and makes happen that is magical and interesting.

What if mobile devices were more like magic wands? I hope they will be in the future. That would be way rad.