Skin and Phones

What if your cell phone could imprint short, coded messages directly onto your skin? That’s one of the ideas to come out of a recent project sponsored by the Royal College of Art’s Helen Hamlyn Center and Research in Motion (RIM), the creators of the BlackBerry. And it’s not quite as far-fetched as it sounds. After a yearlong exploration, a team led by Clara Gaggero, of Vitamins Design, proposed a two-pronged approach to making mobile-phone calls less invasive and better integrated into people’s daily lives. On the software side, a SmartCall system would let callers indicate the urgency, subject, and deadline for a telephone conversation. Then a proposed SkinDisplay material would show this information in raised letters and symbols on the call recipient’s phone case. By pressing a thumb or forefinger against it, BlackBerry addicts could get a quick read on the call without actually pulling out their phone. At the moment, this is just a concept—but according to Gaggero, existing piezoelectric technology makes SkinDisplay eminently possible (and RIM is already going after a patent). “It definitely can happen,” she says. Mason Currey