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.
Camphor, saltpeter and sal ammoniac sealed in alcohol, growing crystals a Royal Navy admiral swore could read the coming storm. Science calls it a slow thermometer, and two centuries of windowsills have disagreed.
Three thousand answers, sealed on the board at build time, with no way to add a three-thousand-and-first. The ceiling is the design.
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.
Sabrina Merayo Nuñez grows lamps from algae and medieval paint recipes. They pulse when you walk up to them.
A modder took a 1995 Casio day planner and rebuilt the entire inside while leaving the outside untouched. The instinct here is the opposite of the cyberdeck: don't invent a new form for the silicon, find one that already knows what it wants to be.
A handmade web cemetery, complete with handwritten obituaries for ICQ, Songza, Microsoft Tay, Clippy, and a long list of services and devices that quietly stopped existing. The joke is funny. The premise underneath, that objects deserve a death, is the part to sit with.
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.
Atsuhiko Misawa and Koji Tanada share KAAT's first-ever sculpture show, carving deer and children from single blocks of camphor wood. The technique is older than most countries. The argument is current.
Delcy Morelos hand-built an earthen pavilion the length of a basketball court inside the Barbican's concrete Sculpture Court. The walls are clay, hay, and antifungal spice, made to live and breathe through the summer.