Do you feel bereft when your smartphone isn’t in your hands and you’re not swiping or pinching or zooming? Well aside from the fact that you may have social media addiction, it may also be that the gestures you do on your device keep you from fidgeting or being awkward. Well, there are always fidget spinners and cubes, but if you want something that’s closer to a phone but is not actually a phone, Vienna-based designer Klemens Schillinger has come up with the Substitute Phone.
It’s actually a series of devices that you can use to imitate the motions that you normally do on your smartphone, like swiping, scrolling, pinching, zooming. These are therapeutic tools that can be used for those who are trying to cure themselves of being too attached to their mobile device, to the point where you feel like you can’t live without it. Or at least you can’t go somewhere without it. He thought of creating objects “that would provide the physical stimulation but not the connectivity.”
The marble-looking stone beads are made from the natural stone Holowith. They’re set into a phone-shaped black polyoxymethylene (POM) plastic called acetal and it is able to replicate the actual weight of an ordinary smartphone. You can choose from among the five designs, depending on what it is that your fingers normally do on your device.
The Substitute Phone was created for the #Offline – Design for the (Good Old) Real World at the Vienna Design Week a few weeks ago. No news yet if they will actually be available for consumers in the real world.
VIA: Dezeen
