People love to hate their phones. After all, smartphones are an easy culprit of a collective sense of digital despair. They’re devices designed for doomscrolling, portals to a media ecosystem dominated by neverending ads and social media algorithms that hoover up every scrap of our attention. And yet, we just can’t seem to quit them.
Not that there haven’t been a plethora of efforts over the years to claw back that focus and attention. Both Android and iOS have a swath of digital wellbeing tools that can limit app permissions and restrict the amount of time you spend in places you’d rather not. Older “dumb” phones have passionate adherents, as does the rise of efforts to deliberately hobble your smartphone. There are even whole devices, like the Light Phone, which offer only the bare necessities (i.e. no internet browsing capabilities) as a way to keep you from getting sucked into a device.
Some of these efforts work better than others, but a design agency in London thinks it has found an even better way to help keep you from staring into your rectangular glass abyss: Just cover the damn thing.
Out of Sight
Special Projects, a self-described "innovation studio" that focuses on digital wellness, has a prototype it calls Aperture. It is a concept phone case that aims to keep you from staring at your screen all day—namely, by covering most of it. The pitch works like this: Pop the case off the back of your phone, flip it around, then slap it over the top of your screen. There you go. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
Not that the whole screen will be completely covered. Most cases have a small hole where your case makes room for the cameras on the back of the device. It is in that space that Special Projects wants to present a small window that prioritizes only the most important things you do on a phone—messages, calls, asking for directions.
Behind the scenes, an app on the phone controls what you see and presents it in a clean, minimalist format—ideally one that fades to black the second you don’t need it anymore. But that window is all you get to see on your screen. The rest is physically covered, keeping you focused on the important things you want your device to display.
The idea, according to Special Projects cofounders Clara Gaggero Westaway and Adrian Westaway, is to make it just enough of a bother to remove the case from your screen once you’ve got it on there.
“What's nice with this is that it is quite a pain,” Adrian says. “I mean, taking your case off is not a real pain in the scheme of life, but it has that sweet spot of friction that you’re not going to be flipping it and doing it all the time.”
“It’s basically transforming a compulsive behavior into a conscious behavior,” Clara says.
The Aperture case doesn’t actually exist yet, mind you. It’s more art project than actual project. But while it may not be a reality, Special Projects hopes it inspires more thoughtful reflection about the time we spend on our phones. Something like an app that keeps you off your phone by guilt-tripping you about killing a digital tree if you scroll too much.
“This is something that many people are struggling with,” Adrian says. “There are many solutions, but there was something about this that just clicked.”
Aesthetically, Special Projects’ works evoke a sort of Teenage Engineering ethos in the pursuit of digital wellbeing. Their attention-oriented projects began with temporary solutions. Encasing your phone in a paper sleeve or using an app to print out a sheet of paper with all the information—contacts, calendar meetings, grocery list, for example—you might need from your phone for a day.
The idea for Aperture came years later, when the Westaways noticed that the window carved out for the cluster of camera lenses on the back of an iPhone case were about the same size as an Apple Watch. With Apple managing to get plenty of information into the limited window of its wrist-mounted device, the team figured it would be easy enough to do the same on the phone. What if you could enable that by just flipping your phone case around?
“We just started playing with these ideas,” Adrian says. “The idea that we quite liked was by using two things you already own, you can transform them into what feels like a new kind of device.”
However, while the original vision was to transform any phone case into an Aperture-enabled helper, the reality is unlikely to play out that way. Firstly, the switcheroo might not work with just any phone case, because depending on how the case is manufactured, it simply might not fit the other way around, or might inadvertently press buttons along the side of a phone.
The other problem is accessing the operating system to be able to display information in the cutout window. To get that to work, you'd need to download an app, then grant that app all sorts of permissions to create its minimalist display onscreen—messages, phone calls, proximity. In order for all that to work—and to work without exposing all your data—the app would need to work with manufacturers like Apple and Google.
Despite the appeal of not having to buy a new device, a la the Light Phone, Aperture might wind up having to be a separate product after all. But as a starter, the Westaways say Special Projects is working with a phone case manufacturer to design cases that can fit just fine either on the back or front of the device.
“It’s a vision,” Adrian says. “And now we've had in a small group of people some interests and we're now trying to see how much of this we make real.”
They’re hopeful that the physical blocking of a screen will be more impactful than what software tools let you do. It’s easy to ignore a warning notification, or just go back into your settings and turn off an app timer when you really need just one more minute of TikTok this time, you swear. But a recent study found that hard blocking mobile internet access on phones resulted in boosting people’s attention spans, mental health, and “subjective well-being.” Perhaps hard blocking a screen could have the same impact.
“I'm very aware of how much control has been taken,” says Matteo Bandi, a designer at Special Projects about his own efforts to reclaim his attention. “I've tried a lot of things. The turning the phone black and white, making a no-phone safe area around kind of tactical places, like the bedroom and all that. It works—for brief periods of time.”
Again, the Aperture case isn’t out yet, but Special Projects is asking for feedback for what features should be included if the idea of just covering your screens actually takes off.
“We never think that taking away technology altogether would be the right choice,” Clara says. “But how can we help people to use the phone, to use technology rather than be used by it?”
