Hey Facebook Friend, I’m Busy!

The AVA is a Smartphone cover with unique communicative capabilities. It uses the built-in accelerometer or gyroscope of the Smartphone, to intuitively change your social network status to ‘absent’, ‘available’, ‘busy’, or ‘away’. For example, if you are logged into Facebook, and want to switch your status from ‘available’ to ‘invisible’, then simply nudge the shell to a side-face. This not only changes the status but also changes the mode from ‘ring’ to ‘silent’. The only other corresponding mode is ‘vibrate’.

  • AVA transforms your phone in your avatar by functioning as a bridge between the physical and virtual worlds.
  • Users can change their virtual status by physically interacting with their Smartphone.
  • By leaning the phone up, down or to one side or the other, the user can generate a status: ‘absent’, ‘available’, ‘busy’, or ‘away’.
  • This synchronizes with different social networks. The phone will correspondingly be set to the appropriate mode – such as ‘vibrate’, ‘ring’, or ‘silent’.

AVA is a 2013 red dot award: design concept winner!

Designer: Germain Verbrackel