This “active damping” case , a bit like an airbag for your phone, is the brainchild of Philip Frenzel, an engineer at Aalen University in Germany. His idea won the top award from the German Society for Mechatronics, which considered projects from students all over the country. Frenzel, like me, doesn’t like compromising his phone’s aesthetic with some ugly protective shell, but he likes even less the shattered countenance that inevitably results from this aesthetic decision. Why not something that only deploys when the phone is in danger, then? He got to work. The activation mechanism he arrived at early: sensors that detect when the phone is in free fall and activate the next step. But what was that step? In his tinkering, he initially thought of installing an actual airbag mechanism on the phone. But that, and a foam-based alternative, and a few others, simply didn’t prove practical. Finally inspiration struck. Instead of something soft, why not something springy? Perhaps…...