A Transparent Phone From My Dream
June 2nd, 2020
Shane Lee
How should I know I am a self-motivated designer and a true dream maker? And how can I use it to help the design industry? One of my design cases to share with you:
I have been working in the design industry for almost 20 years, and it has two main steps:
(1) First 10 years: I do the design projects with my gift from God, absorbing nutrients from different high-quality design environments and hands-on working on as much as possible creativity product design projects. I appreciate all the friends and mentors I ever met and working together.
(2) Second 10 years: base on the first 10 years of experiences and digestions, I built-up my own working philosophy for creating products and management skills and continue to influence people where I can explore.
Talking about how I explore my potential design capability in the first 10 years of my career? I tried to do ideation in my dream, and yes, it’s the dream that you’ll do it every day when you are sleeping. Usually, I worked very hard, and I continue to think about ideation whatever I am doing, so I can connect my life into my design works. And I usually got inspirations from my life and implement into my imagination of creative projects.
When 2004, my first time visiting Tokyo Japan for a business trip, I bought a transparent calculator, and I was very curiousness how does it make? And how can the structure be transparent with functions? So I started to collect all kinds of transparent accessory products, and I got a chance to implement it in one of my Motorola projects.
In 2005, when I was working for the new generation phone concepts, I worked very hard in day and night, and as people usually said: “you’ll dream what you have been thinking in the daytime” as Chinese phrase: “日有所思，夜有所梦.” We can also speak in English: “you dream what you scheme,” any other way to descript it?
Anyway, I made a dream to see a view of Jellyfish in the deep sea, it’s transparent and growing with multi-color lighting rhythmically. I instantly draw sketches to record what I have dreamed after I woke up.
I got the inspiration from my dream, and I started to analyze how I can make it a real product with a logical structure, so I began to do ideations to tier all feature phone’s screen, PCB board, battery, and antenna structure.
The most important part of the design is the “see-thought” effect in the keyboard part. I have to thank my collection of transparent accessory products from Tokyo. And it proves it’s possible to make a transparent keyboard and “see-through” effect. So I put all the thoughts together and created the “Jellyfish phone concept.”
I am always fascinated with all kinds of transparent products, and I feel it’s fantastic with magic. Of course, it will need to be evaluated by the R&D team to make sure the feasibility of antenna structure, haptic hand feeling when touching the transparent numeric keyboard, how to assemble the transparent casing without scratching….etc. But as a concept product, it’s enough to explain from design inspiration to ideation to sketch to feasibility.
I designed this concept in 2005, and it’s still a fancy and simple phone design whenever it’s 15 years later from now on, I will buy it as my simple 2nd phone even though it’s all smartphone with a big screen in the market, will you?
Over the 20 years until now, I am still in my role to design more, design bigger, and try to influence more people to do innovation. Think more, think big, think different. And resonate with your soul and dream; make your dream come through whatever it’s daydream or night dream.
