Elliot and my cell phone

I feel like the persistent theme of my writing on this blog is:  Elliot keeps blowing my mind. And he does.

I've been letting him play with my cell phone recently.  No judgments, Luddites: sometimes you need a break, and that cell phone will keep him quiet for almost exactly the amount of time it takes to go to the bathroom.

My cell phone is old-school, by which I mean old.  It's about the size and shape of the old Nokia I used to have in the late 90s:

The reason I bring this is up is to demonstrate that Elliot can easily hold and manipulate my small, light, cheap-ass phone (unlike some selfish parents who care more about their 4G network than their own children.)

So as Elliot's been playing with my phone, he's learned that pushing the buttons causes things to happen on the screen.  I won't go into detail about what he's managed to do when I take my eyes off him.  But if you ever get a text from me that says "xxqwzzqiwn" then you know who sent it.

And so even now, at the tender age of 10 months, he understands this concept of pushing buttons while looking at the space adjacent to it.  This is actually pretty remarkable, if you think about it.  It wasn't so long ago that the only way you could make an object move or ring or jump was by acting on it directly.  Now you can make shapes swirl on a screen.

But that's not the crazy part of the story.  The first few times that Elliot played with the phone, he was fascinated by the buttons.  And he turned the phone so that the buttons were on top (i.e. the phone was upside down in his hands).

Over time he began to draw the connection between the pushing the buttons and seeing changes on screen.  And I assumed that he would start turning the phone the other direction.  In fact, I started handing him the phone right-side up to give him a hint.

Guess what he does?  He turns the phone back upside-down. 

To me the screen belongs above the keypad, but as I watch him play with my phone, I keep forgetting why that design used to seem so obvious and natural.  For Elliot, it's easier to hold the phone with the keys on top, because the phone is actually in his hand rather than jutting off the front of his thumbs.  I don't know about you, but I can relate to the annoying experience of gripping a heavy phone by the bottom edge because that's where the keys are.  

Elliot, unburdened by things like reading words, just grabs the phone the way that makes the most ergonomic sense.  Maybe we could learn something from that.