From customized ring tones to Nokia's jewel-encrusted cell phones, it's increasingly clear that the future of mobile technology lies in personalization. Richard Yelle, a professor at New York City's Parsons School of Design, stands at the nexus of form and function, creating mobile phones that are both stylish and environmentally sound.

Last spring, Yelle and his students joined forces with fashion designer and fellow Parsons instructor Victor Chu and a team of engineering students at the University of Michigan to develop the seed phone — a disposable, biodegradable mobile device complete with an antenna filled with flower seeds. “The goal was to redesign the cellular telephone to improve its human interface and styling, reduce material consumption and increase amenability to recycling while not impacting functionality and cost,” Yelle said.

The further challenge was to develop organic mobile casings that could snap together without screws or other metallic fasteners. The class settled on soy plastic, a resin-like material similar to conventional plastics but made from biodegradable agricultural waste products. When the battery dies or the user gets tired of the device, the seed phone can be disassembled and the battery, circuit board and keypad can be recycled. The rest can be planted to blossom within a month.

The class also created the sausage phone (a soy plastic case housed in a transparent, silicon-based sleeve tied off at the end like a hot dog) and the mood phone (filled with thermotropic crystals that change color based on the user's body temperature). And that's just the beginning, Yelle predicted: “Someday, Donna Karan is going to be designing cell phones. You'll walk into one of the major fashion outlets on Fifth Avenue, and you'll walk out with a new pair of shoes and a phone.”