"Common sense dictates that you shouldn't stick anything in your ear, not even your finger – unless you want to make a phone call with the latest innovation from a Japanese telecom researcher."

"To hear incoming calls, the wearer puts a finger in one ear. The caller's voice is converted to vibrations, which travel through the hand, the finger and into the ear canal. The wearer talks back via the wristband's microphone.

That's not the only sleight of hand necessary. To answer the phone, called Whisper because incoming calls cause the wristband to vibrate, the wearer taps their thumb and index finger together."

"In an earlier work (Buxton, 1986), I speculated on what conclusions a future anthropologist would draw about our physical make-up, based on the tools (namely computers) used by our society. The objective was to point out that these tools reflect a very distorted view of our physiology and the motor/sensory skills. For example, the near absence of pressure sensors reflects a failure to exploit a fundamental and well-developed capability of the hand. The impoverished use of sound reflects a waste of our ability to use audio to make sense out of our environment.

The paper dealt primarily with the domain of the visible and tangible. Nevertheless, things have changed very little in the intervening years. Furthermore, it can well be argued that things are even more distorted if we look at how the technology reflects less visible human traits such as cognition, or social interactions.

In what follows, we use a technology-as-mirror metaphor. One intent is to provide some human-centred criteria for evaluating designs. Another is to help foster a mind-set that will lead to improved designs in the future. "

"Our metaphor is one of three separate mirrors, each reflecting one of these levels. In order to be judged acceptable, designs must provide an acceptable degree of fidelity in how they reflect each of these three aspects of human makeup and activity."