Rob Spalding

Design and the Elastic Mind: SoMo3 by Chrispin Jones, Graham Pullin, Anton Schubert, and Mat Hunter

During this upcoming thesis year, I am interested in exploring twenty-first century etiquette—specifically the decline of these social practices in favor of technology or simply less refined behavior. SoMo3 addresses the former issue. Technology is introduced into our lives at such a rapid pace that our social behavior is strongly impacted from sheer surprise. Social norms continue to become outdated and updated on a daily basis, leading humans to question (or not question, as the case may be) the line between private and public, acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Appropriately, SoMo3 attempts to use its interface to allow users to decide when and where they can make phone calls on their mobile phones. According to MoMA’s website, “the Social Mobiles are not working products but rather sparks for further discussion about the social impact of mobile phones. The SoMo3 musical phone requires its user to play the melody of a telephone number to make a call; the public performance of dialing is a test of whether or not it is appropriate to make a call.” The intangible problem here is the etiquette of making a call in a public space. SoMo3 is its tangible solution (though it is, unfortunately, not in production).
I appreciate this solution because it transforms the use of a mobile phone into a hyperbole of itself—tones we associate with making a private call become the propellant for social awareness, letting the user know that no call in a public space is private. In other words, the designers have used already-existing properties of mobile phones to solve their problem instead of bringing in a new interface. They have accentuated the idea of a public call as performance by integrating a more concrete concept of performance—a musical instrument. The idea of playing an instrumental solo in a public place has been unchanged by technology (read: mortifying to most people), thus the SoMo3 is a successful thought provoker and behavior modifier.

Now…if only this could be reality.