E-paper spent twenty years stuck at page-turn speed. A Boston open-hardware company just got it to keyboard speed and published every file so anyone can check the work.
The calmer-phone category usually works by subtracting software. Side Technologies moved the decision into a component you hold in your hand.
Six pigments, laid down one layer at a time, every time the picture changes. The delay is the part its designer wanted you to notice.
Hiroshi Ishii's Tangible Media Group is building communication channels with the dead. Not AI chatbots. Antique objects that hold the physical traces of people who once touched them.
ECAL and Google asked design students to reimagine the phone around daily rituals. One student made a bird.
A circular screen, an ESP32, and a German maker's own photograph of the moon as the texture map. The choice most builders would skip is the one that gives the object its weight.
Bose killed the cloud. A $5 ESP32 stick called SixBack brings the preset buttons back by pretending to be the server. The speaker never knows the difference.
A solar-powered, e-ink GPS compass that does exactly one thing: points you home. No app, no cell signal, no charger. Built with a XIAO ESP32-C6 and published as open hardware.
A developer put an entire fake Bose cloud on a $5 ESP32 stick. Your SoundTouch speaker can't tell the difference.
A solar-powered e-ink navigator built on an ESP32. It points you home and runs for days. No signal, no charger, no map app.
Back Market is running iPod Shuffle subway ads. TechCrunch just gave the friction-as-feature movement a name. The shift from maximum functionality to maximum well-being now has a market category.
At Columbia's 2026 MFA thesis show, an artist from the Iyarhe Nakoda Nation lists "my ancestor's stories" as a material, equal to wood and ribbon. The room fills with sound that knows where you are sitting, and refuses to be louder than that.