Visual Physical Phone Book
One reason I prefer FB Messenger (or any other social messaging app like Whatsapp, Telegram, etc.) over texting someone with the default phone texting app is because in Messenger, when I go to message someone, I see their great face looking back at me in their profile picture!
If I open my texting app to text or call someone instead, then usually they will just have empty circles because I'm supposed to manually add a picture for them. With Messenger, it feels a lot nicer to be able to see their smiling faces automatically, and occasionally see them get updated. Of course, I could add photos manually for each of my friends in my phone contact list, but that would generally be too much of a hassle.
If I were to put in the time to add pictures for all my friends manually though, I'd rather do something far better than just uploading their images into my static phone contact book.
What if we took the level of warmness that seeing your friends’ faces brings, but made it even better by bringing them into the physical world?
I would feel a lot more connected to my friends if I could just open a real physical contact book, enjoy turning the pages as I see my friends, and then tap on a face to dial the phone from there.
Here's a preliminary design of it. Pressing any of the photos will send a signal to a microcontroller embedded in the back of the contact book to call that friend.
