Emotional Hardware by London College of Communication

This project aims to activate and tune smartphone users’ material intelligence through stories and objects that provoke them to think about their relationship with their devices – and by extension, with digital technologies and planet Earth.

The goal is to offer critical views on the omnipresent device that is the smartphone, by revealing the journey it takes before reaching a human’s hands – and that which it follows after. On the one hand, it is meant to awaken the user’s sense of care, respect, and responsibility to such an object, and, on the other, to empower the consumer to have more agency in the way they relate to and use these devices. All this is designed in a space that encourages reflection, experimentation, and feeling.

The piece works primarily as an exhibition set-up but is designed to be expanded to other mediums such as the digital environment.

It was selected as the representative piece of the MA Data Visualisation 2022 cohort and was exhibited at London’s Bell House Artists’ Open House 2022.