It’s becoming that dark stretch of autumn.
The leaves have fallen, the colors have gone, and all that’s left is the sinking feeling that the night is encroaching upon the day. Like most people, I’m working remotely. Day after day, most of my interactions happen through this screen. My workday has pleasant moments, rewarding moments, and even moments of creativity. All are felt as only a fraction of what they should be. Tasks and deadlines punctuate my hours with glints of meaning, but they soon dull. I can’t share a secret glance with a colleague, overhear someone’s weekend plans, or smell a neighbor’s coffee. I can’t intuit their body language. The screen’s rendition of my colleague in Mexico pales compared to her actual presence. The specificities of her voice just don’t come through. A sort of numbness is eclipsing my senses.
The internet and I grew up together. I was a nomad dragged along to military posts with my family. I connected with distant friends through screens and software. MSN, Skype, Zoom. Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok. Desktop, laptop, mobile. But as devices evolved beyond communication and into dopamine triggers something changed. If I don’t catch myself, I fixate zombie-like on the screen. I’m both alive and dead. It’s a twisted relationship. I am torn between this paradox of amazement (my phone can do so much) and the deep blandness of the experience (my world has shrunk to 6x3 inches).
Author Kevin Kelly calls technology the seventh kingdom of life: “The more lifelike we train our technology to be, the more convivial it becomes for us and the more sustainable the technium becomes in the long run. The more convivial a technology is, the more it aligns with its nature as the seventh kingdom of life”[1].
I think a lot about Kelly’s words. Today’s screens, the medium for the “technium”, are themselves zombies—not quite convivial enough to feel alive, sometimes close enough to feel like kin, and simultaneously, disconcerting. We charge them when they’re low, we listen to their sounds, we sleep beside them. We go to them to answer our biggest questions and to hide our deepest secrets. How can an object so intimate look and feel so sterile?
Recently, through chance or serendipity, I was connected with a group of women through that very same medium: screens. Four women from four different continents—Nada, Sequoia, Paige, and Catherine—all questioning our intimate but broken relationships with electronics. We asked ourselves, could we enhance a phone’s design to reflect our relationship with them?
What if our screens were more like living creatures? What if they were gooey or soft? What if they matured? as Nada suggested. What if they brought us the same sensorial joy we feel when we see our favorite person?
We thought about the subtle aspects that make us feel connected. Light, sound, and smell guide us. But touch makes us present. What if our phone had a “skin” we could respond to? And what if that skin collected energy from the air just like a pair of lungs?
Drawing on research done by scientists at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, we created a design for a phone that harnesses a protein found in the anaerobic mud bacteria Geobacter sulfurreducens. When exposed to ambient humidity, the protein can conduct current like a metal. When linked together, these proteins form nanowires that can create an electrical charge using the surrounding humidity. The nanowires are capable of producing 0.5 volts across a 7-micrometer-thick film—a measurement thinner than most human hair. According to our calculations, powering a phone would require about two square meters of film, the footprint equivalent of a large closet.
While unfeasible to carry a flat sheet of those dimensions around with a cell phone, the sheet could be folded, or even crumpled, to fit a smaller space. We looked to the surface of the human gut as inspiration. Covered with finger-like villi, the gut has 260-300 square meters of surface area (equivalent to a tennis court) but still fits under a shirt. Our hope is to create a villi-like skin on phones to both charge and feel more like a creature.
There is a meditation I practice to conjure the future. It helps me feel present, yet still able to imagine the world I want to help design. I close my eyes, relax my jaw, neck, and spine, and breathe. In this practice of relating to the devices and materials around my room through my senses, I am bringing the lifeless to life. I home onto every fuzzy body, itchy fiber, and feathery tickle.
With my fingers, I feel along my phone. The stark flat texture leaves me feeling nothing from this exchange. The case is hard plastic, cold glass. My exploration continues to the knotted cable leading to the wall. Still nothing.
I imagine what I want to feel from my electronics. I want to feel enlivened, as if by a tactile poem. I imagine an organic body found in nature: bumpy, slightly slimy, rubbery, definitely soft, and also porous. I want my companion to have soft spines that I can smooth my fingers over. The villi squish under my fingers, their jelly-like waviness remind me of the sea. I faintly sense how we are linked by a shared need for air, metabolizing its contents to stay alive.
As I touch, I cannot help but be touched. The evolutionary ingenuity of a tiny bacterium has given my companion its first breath. I want my technological story to be full of tenderness, mindful connection, and mutual touch. I want my device to live to its fullest capacity until it is time to repurpose its material body. Then, I will return it to its ancestors deep in the mud.
[1] Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York, Viking Penguin, 2014.
Cite This Essay
Electric Eels. “Phone, A Friend.” Biodesigned: Issue 10, 28 February, 2022. Accessed [month, day, year].