Want to Look at Your Phone Less? Just Cover Your Screen

“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 wellness. The idea for Aperture came about while the team worked on a project called Paper Phone, an app that let you 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.

During this project, the Westaways noticed that the window carved out for the cluster of camera lenses on the back of a phone 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 Westaways 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.