The Internet Phone
The Internet Phone was designed and created by James Zhou, Sebastian Hunkeler, Isak Frostå, Jens Obel all students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. The artifact is their “attempt to make the intangible processes of the internet tangible in order to inspire people to learn more about it.” With The Internet Phone they hope “that by understanding the workings of the internet you will know more about our world and its essential technologies.”
Connection
There are a number of interesting aspects to this project. For instance, the designers’ desire to create an artifact that helps a user better understand a system. The different modes of interaction with the tokens (article, developer, incognito, and history) are also interesting in they give a user the ability to understand different technical aspects of the website. (Note: not really sure if the incognito mode reveals any technical aspect, just sounds like the voice of the main character form V for Vendetta). Paying similar attention to making the technical aspects of an artifact will be very important for anything I design.
Another thing to pay special attention to, is the designers decision to force a user to hang up the phone, only for the phone to ring in a matters of seconds. I can only think they did this to replicate the actual process of looking up an IP address and not immediately receiving back data, but waiting a period of time before data starts coming back from the IP address. I do wonder how many users understood the reasoning behind this decision and didn’t just account this interaction to the designer’s inability to get it to work a certain way. It will be very important for users to understand the different aspects of an artifact, especially those that might be construed as not friendly to users.