Could you replace your smartphone with a ‘Paper Phone’?
There’s no escaping technology in our lives: we carry it in on our bodies, we drive in it, we work with it, and it watches our every move.
But designers have come up with a new concept: the Paper Phone.
Listed on Experiments with Google and designed by London-based Special Projects Studio, Paper Phone is designed to help you “have a little break away from your digital world by printing a personal booklet of the key information you’ll need that day”.
Available for Android users, you’ll have to download the open source Paper Phone app from Google Play. (If you can’t find it, here’s a link.)
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The app allows you to choose the information you need, such as contacts, maps, meetings, task lists or the weather, and then organises it on a sheet of paper which you can then print.
There are also customisable ‘paper apps’ like recipes, phrasebooks or notepads that let you do what you need to do.
“We hope this little experiment can help you try a digital detox from technology and help you focus on the things that matter the most,” wrote Special Projects.
And if you’re concerned about the impact of printing paper on the environment, the studio points out that printing a page a day would produce 10 grams of carbon dioxide a year, while using your mobile phone for just an hour a day creates a stunning 1.25 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year when you take into account the energy required for network and server infrastructure.
Yikes.
So if you need a break from your phone, try printing it out.
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