From the Spring 07 issue of Ambidextrous Magazine (theme : The Future) comes this fascinating snippet of how people are modifying their behaviours to use technology.

In an interview, an 18 yeart old student called Altan reveals how:

“…he has begun to experiment with increasing his own efficiency; he reshapes his fingernails to accurate points to better use tiny touch screens.”

This speaks loudly to a couple of interesting trains of thought:

1. the technology is designed badly in the first place – interfaces that require body modification should not really make it out of the lab (“Hey Mum, I just got my head modified to make my ear closer to my mouth to use this waaay cool tiny phone”)
2. scanning for weak signals like this can reveal valuable insights into the design of your product

(p.s. I’m catching up on a lot of magazine backlog, so excuse the timeliness of this post.)