Design thinking

“Don’t you think I need a new phone? There is a plethora of phones out there, but none of them particularly impressive,” my husband said exhausted after yet another seemingly relentless hunt for the perfect phone. “Do you remember your first phone,” I asked shifting my gaze towards him. The question seemed to unlock a forgotten corridor of memories; we found ourselves travelling back to the lane of nostalgia.Faint memories of Nokia 1100’s soft buttons, bulky design, and monochrome screen resurfaced vividly. As children, my brother and I would wage a mini tug of war over who got to play the snake game. By our school years, phones started acquiring distinctive personalities.My husband recalled being fascinated by the Nokia 6600 that his father owned. He would gape at its joystick and colour screen — rudimentary compared to today’s AMOLED standards, but back then nothing short of captivating. The camera shrank the photos to pocket size, letting him capture the quotidian scenes, perhaps unleashing a fledgling photographer in him.Then came the Samsung SGH-200, a flip phone that secured its place in the hierarchy of cool. The sheer act of flipping it to answer a call and snapping it back afterwards seemed to radiate sophistication.In his teenage years, the melophile in him found a companion in the Sony Ericsson’s Walkman series. There was a time when people visited barber shops and tea stalls to catch the daily buzz and latest songs playing on the radio. Phones with built-in multimedia became the ultimate travel companion. Looking back, I wonder how we endured those interminable advertisements without a skip button or an ad-free subscription. We even mastered the art of untangling wired earphones, an exercise in patience. The Bluetooth earphones and AirPods have made this struggle a thing of the past.Before QWERTY keyboards took over, texting was a painstaking exercise of patience. To summon the letter ‘c’, one had to press the number 2 three times with the sincere hope that the next letter would not require another series of frantic presses. Blackberry came to the rescue with its QWERTY keyboard, making texting facile and becoming a professional status symbol.Styled with a stylusElevating it further, Motorola’s stylus-equipped phones exerted a leverage over novelty with the idea of interacting with a screen in a way that was still unfamiliar. The iPhone, meanwhile, seemed to defy the odds and carve out a niche with its distinctive ecosystem and emphasis on data security.Chronologically, our relationship with mobile phones evolved alongside the technology. Each of these phones seemed to have a personality of its own. They catered to different tastes and aspirations. Choosing the right one was almost a declaration of who you were.By his college years, smartphones had begun to gain traction. With the advent of mobile Internet, selfie cameras, and multimedia connectivity, we eagerly hopped onto the new bandwagon of online socialising. As screens grew four to five inches, our college notes began acquiring a digital avatar. It was a time when 1GB of data felt abundant and 100 text messages a month seemed like a generous allowance. Notes that once required standing in queue at photocopy shops were now just a click away as PDFs, often downloaded in haste and sought after with renewed urgency just before exams.Familiar templateFast forward to today: phones seem to have been made with a cookie-cutter — similar design, shapes, and camera arrangements, though at different price points. Each upgrade arrives with a familiar template and a cosmetic tweak — a slightly repositioned camera, a new curve along the edges, a new shade often swinging between muted hues and vibrant shades, a tad more memory, the latter often paraded as a selling point. Place two smartphones side by side and they could almost pass for siblings.Perhaps smartphone design has reached a point of saturation, where novelty is becoming increasingly elusive. The paradox of today’s smartphone is that it has become extraordinarily capable without becoming particularly memorable. Or perhaps the irony is that in the nascent stages of mobile phones, we marvelled at every small thing our phones learned to do. Now that they could seemingly do almost everything, perhaps we have stopped marvelling at them.There is little left for them to become, because we have already asked them to become almost everything.lubnazulfikar@gmail.com Published - November 15, 2026 01:50 pm IST