A6- Josh Fields

Cell-Phone Bothers:
The issues that were/are most bothersome about my cell-phone included:
-Calls while sleeping or napping
-Phone goes off in class (text or ring or alarm or e-mail, etc. i.e. not muted)
-Not being able to see who you are talking too


My Ideal Smart Phone:
The ideal smart phone which I would design to solve these problems seems rather feasible. For starters, to deal with the issue of napping or sleeping, the phone would need to know when I'm asleep. Since I typically forget to 'tell my phone' when I'm sleeping (i.e. mute it), the phone would need a way to figure out when it thinks I'm asleep. Also, I still need my alarm to go off (audibly) so the phone would need to know that phone calls at 2am are not okay, but an alarm clock at 6am is okay. Since I usually set my alarm right before i go to sleep, some machine learning algorithm should be capable of picking out actions that occur right before sleep and realize that I am sleeping. The social technical gap here is that until my phone can read brain waves, it has no fool proof way of knowing I'm actually asleep without being told while for a human being, telling if someone asleep is pretty easy.

To stop my phone from going off in class, the phone would need a locational awareness. Thanks to the iPhone however, most phones have this feature. Thus I could set locations on my GPS in which my phone is to automatically set to turn silent. This is very doable and the gap is really only in implementation.

The biggest issue for me is not being able to see who you are conversing with while talking on the phone. All the subtle facial expressions are lost, and I often find myself trying to interpret fascial expressions over the phone by 'listening' to the way the expression distorts their voice. For close friends or a girlfriend this is somewhat practical, but in reality its not possible to know if someone is smiling or blushing, etc. while talking on the phone. The issue becomes interesting when considering Ackerman's and others' statement that the purpose of HCI and fields like it is to evolve technology to' human standards', not the other way around. IF this is true, I can argue there will always be a gap with cell phones because humans were never meant to have long conversations (or any conversation?) without being in direct visual contact with the other party. Visual cues play a very important and necessary role in communication and the definition of a 'phone' precludes this necessity. Therefor, I believe, the social-technical gap that exists between phones and humans will always exist or is at least extremely difficult to replace- and this is the sort of stance Ackerman seems to take throughout his paper.