The Device Detox app reconnects people with reality in the smartphone age, repurposing the biggest distraction in our lives into a tool that promotes better social habits. As explained in the promotional video here, a face is simply more valuable than a screen, and our bad habits mean we often miss the best things happening in the real world.
Unlike the 'do not disturb' mode already found (and not used) on most devices, the app requires minimal interaction from the user, operating on a set-and-forget basis. Device Detox uses geolocation technology to determine when the user arrives in a set location, and activates detox mode automatically.
Rather than simply switching off all connections, detox mode operates like a virtual secretary to inform attempted correspondents that the user is otherwise engaged, asking them to consider whether their message is worth interrupting the task at hand.
The Device Detox app extends the principles introduced by the Device Detox box (further information here), helping users to maintain better habits for healthier, safer, and more efficient device use.
Screen Vistas is a cinema advertising agency in Palmerston North. I produced this short cinematic sting as part of a nationwide campaign to promote brand awareness and direct viewers to the agency’s new website.
Matariki is an annual highlight of the Māori calendar. As well as marking the beginning of the new year, it holds traditional significance as an indicator of the harvest season ahead. The constellation's traverse of the night sky has long been used as a guide to planting and gathering, and today serves as a focal point for many cultural celebrations around New Zealand.
I designed this calendar in 2014 as a way of promoting Matariki observations in New Zealand. The typographic treatment is unusual for a calendar, making a striking departure from conventional tabular format to instead emphasise phases of the moon in an organic, twisting structure. Dramatic contrasts in scale establish a clear information hierarchy, and generous negative space ensures that data remains appealing and easy to read.
A response to our current digital obsession, the Device Detox Box serves as a first touchpoint to introduce users to the practice of device mediation. Ideal for use in cafés, business networking events, and at dinner parties, the box promotes better social habits by popping up an instruction panel when it is opened, and requesting users to swap the wooden 'phones' inside for their own phones. With their phone taken out of the equation, participants are then obliged to engage with each other instead of a screen.
Each wooden phone contains a set of personal questions that gauge how well the group know each other, and are intended to provoke conversation. The user asks their peers questions about themselves, and if nobody can answer it correctly, the question panel is turned around to highlight the gaps in their knowledge, adding a competitive element to the experience.
There are NFC chips embedded in the box. When users retrieve their phones, they will have been directed to the app store to prompt them to download the Device Detox app, which helps to further promote better device habits (further information here). This same NFC technology can be used in less conspicuous products as well, such as bar coasters, as a physical prompt for app users to switch their device into 'detox mode'.
A personal project, I created this camera business card holder for my dad's 50th birthday. Having grown up in a house full of cameras, the Nikon FM2 was his first camera, and became my first film camera almost 30 years later.
To make the model I traced and stylised the most iconic features of the original camera using Adobe Illustrator, then laser cut the layers out of 5mm poplar plywood.