When you think about it, smartphones haven’t changed dramatically since the iPhone was first released in 2007. Sure, they have gotten faster, more powerful, and thinner. They have far better sound, displays, and cameras. But at the end of the day, we’re all still using our smartphones the same way we did then: by tapping a glass screen.

That’s frustrating, because there’s a world of other ways we could interact with our devices, from reaching through them to touch someone 3,000 miles away or using puffs of air to feel objects and textures in mid-air.

These methods of interacting with our devices are called haptics, and it’s the area in smartphone and mobile device design where innovation has virtually stood still since the introduction of the touch screen. Why? Miniaturizing advanced haptics and making them cheap enough for mass-production is a problem, but according to interaction designer Ivan Poupyrev of Google, a bigger problem is that richer interaction on mobile devices would require consumers to start thinking of smartphones less like gadgets and more like automobiles–big-ticket items that need to be tuned up regularly. Could a Lego-like smartphone, such as Google’s Project Ara, help change that?

“All haptic technology requires something to move in order for it to work,” Poupyrev tells Co.Design. For example, when your smartphone vibrates, it’s because of a tiny physical motor about the size of a Tic Tac inside the device. This motor is very small and simple, but it’s enough to make your smartphone buzz, and it allows smartphone makers to do cool things like give you simple haptic feedback when you touch the screen.

The more complicated the interaction, the more moving parts you need to make them work.

The problem facing haptics is that the more complicated the interaction, the more moving parts are required to make them work. Consider, for example, MIT’s inFORM table, which allows you to reach through it and touch people and objects on the other side. Even if such technology could be miniaturized enough to fit into a smartphone, it would require hundreds of tiny moving parts to work. And there’s a big problem with moving parts: because they move, they break. Often.





“Look at a typical product people use every day with a lot of moving parts: your car,” says Poupyrev. “We’re used to the idea that we need to bring them into the mechanic every year for a tune-up, and that if we don’t, they’ll have problems. But no one views their phones that way.”