The Wap telephone has so far failed to live up to the hype. People are not convinced that they really want to surf the net on a screen the size of a large postage stamp. Mobile users may be much more enthusiastic if they get the chance to find the cat or to avoid stampeding reindeer.

These were just some of the ideas that came out of a recent research project that brought together electronics and communications companies and an academic research group that works in computer related design.

The Flirt project, (Flexible Information and Recreation for Mobile Users), started early in 1998. This was before many people had even heard of Wireless application protocol (Wap) and while the standards were still evolving. The project, devised and managed by UK-based Philips Research Laboratories (PRL), part of the Dutch electronics group, was a part of the IT for Mobility theme of Esprit, the European Union's information technologies programme.

Flirt, which is due to finish at the end of this month, set out to "improve the state of the art in service delivery mechanisms to mobile handset users". The project took around 20 man-years over two years at a total cost of E2.3m, with the EU contributing a subsidy of E1.25m.

As well as Philips, the other main industrial participants were the Helsinki Telephone Corporation of Finland, and the French company Infogrames Entertainment.

The aim of the project, says David Bell, a principal scientist at PRL, was to "get a better understanding of what the consumers wanted to do once they could access content on our network".

Tim Masham, marketing manager for Philips Consumer Communications, admits: "We became a bit too excited and carried away as an industry." Everyone, it seems, was working hard to make it all happen technically rather than finding out what users really wanted from mobile communications.

This is where the academic input came into the Flirt project, through a group at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. The RCA has a long history of collaboration on design issues with Philips Research and was at first enlisted to provide design input.

"We were brought in to make things look nice," says Fiona Raby, a senior research fellow in computer related design at the RCA. The team soon got sucked deeper into the project. "We ended up producing some of the content," she explains.

At first, says Ms Raby, the pressure was on to miniaturise the internet. They soon realised that there were other things that you could do. "We ended up challenging lots of these assumptions," she adds.

Flirt chose to consult consumers in Finland, and to conduct trials in Helsinki, because the country is an advanced market for mobile telephony. It is, after all, the home of Nokia, which has been a trailblazer in the business.

Philips had also worked on other research projects with Helsinki Telecom, now known as Elisa Communications. The telecom company installed the system in its network and carried out trials to ensure that all of the components would work together.

"The first thing we did was to go to Helsinki," says Ms Raby. They soon found that it was not easy using a mobile phone when the temperature was sub-arctic and where heavy gloves were essential - hardly the best environment for using tiny buttons and screens.

While it provided some lessons, it was not really the physical aspects of Helsinki that the researchers set out to study. When thinking about mobile communications, says Ms Raby, it is important to remember that "in the end it is a social medium. That is what is so exciting about it."

This is where the RCA team came into the Flirt project. "They spent some time understanding the culture and hanging about in Helsinki," says Mr Bell. "In this way," he explains, "they helped us to understand what services made sense to mobile users."

The project also held focus groups with consumers. In particular, they were keen to find out what women and young people thought about the potential for Wap and mobile communications, and what services might appeal to these audiences.

The RCA group devised a number of services and tried them out on people. Here an important factor was the cellular nature of mobile telephony, which gave Ms Raby's team the opportunity to devise services that depend on where the user is.

This was one of the surprises of the project, says Mr Bell. It means that "you can explore leaving messages in places for people".

One idea was to place a virtual cat in one cell. Users could then look for the cat, receiving messages when they are in the right place. Find the cat and an image of the cat appears on the mobiles' screens. Mr Bell suggests that a department store might want to "rent" the cat for a day to lure customers in through its doors.

Another game that the RCA team devised, to create a sense of community among mobile users, was the reindeer stampede.

In the run-up to the game, subscribers would receive a message about a herd on the edge of the city. Then they would be warned that the animals are getting restless. Next the stampede would begin and the animal would charge across the cells.

The users' screens would show ever larger pictures of reindeer on their screens, until the screen goes black for those who happen to be the wrong place. The narrative would end with a head count of the victims.

Such seemingly simple ideas challenged the technical teams. For example, they had to devise ways to show images in a screen, and to compress those images at the base stations so that they could travel over a slow network without hindering the phone traffic.

The Wap standard is text based and static, explains Mr Bell, so Philip's R&D team had to develop a new graphics technology. One issue was the need to keep down power consumption, always a problem with diminutive mobile devices.

"We have run animation overnight and the impact on the battery is minimal," says Mr Bell.

The graphics technology is already going into new mobile handsets due to go on sale next year. This development also provided two of the six patents that have come out of Flirt. Another is for a so-called microbrowser for mobile phones.

These developments underline the value of bringing what has been called the social factor into this work. The potential for mobile communications is enormous, says Ms Raby, but one obstacle to wider access is the absence of tools that artists, for example, can use to develop content ideas. There needs to be more access for creative people into this medium, she says. "It will go crazy when we can all play with it."