Human-centered iterative design is necessary to find interfaces that useful, and pleasurable. It is currently very expensive to develop functional prototypes that can be tested with users. By the time they can be tested, it is often too late or too expensive to make fundamental design changes. We need new tools to lower the threshold and accelerate the construction of low-fidelity functional prototypes to identify fundamental design problems earlier in the design process, before significant costs are invested.
Mobile phones have the opportunity to become our best friends, trusted assistants, and beloved pets. Phones as social actors can help us cope with a burgeoning set of communication channels demanding attention like people calling us, "poking us", or writing on our walls. The social actors can also serve as a proxy for delivering and receiving information creating a level of indirection that fosters plausible deniability. Recommendations and information coming from our social actor phones will be more trustworthy and relevant.
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