People are hitting their limits with screen time. They are fed up with incessantly checking email, scrolling, texting, and tapping, and are desperately looking for ways out. Some are downloading apps or buying devices that block social media specifically (a big, bad culprit of brain drain, I don’t have to tell you), others are purchasing dumb phones that only allow calls and texts, and at least one person has turned their smartphone into a complete drag to use by nesting it inside a severe, six-pound metal case that resembles a Tesla truck.
But what if—bear with me—to save ourselves from the well-known-and-reported-on perils of too much screen time, we had a place to park our smartphones at home? You mean like a landline? Yes, a landline. That’s the proposition of Coilie, a wall-mounted dock with a coiled charger that resembles that of an old-school phone. Groan all you want, but the founders say that preorders via Kickstarter have blown their predictions for demand out of the water. “People want this product, they want to buy it, they want to be able to hang up their phones,” company cofounder Kate Trey tells Anjulie Rao in her latest for Dwell.
As Rao reports, Coilie is just one example of how many of us are “landlining” our smartphones at home by choosing intentional places to hang them up, whether to take back our time, connect with loved ones, or remake our spaces into the restful, restorative sanctuaries we want them to be. Here’s why we’re using nostalgia for the corded phone to free us from our screen-time obsessions.
—Duncan Nielsen, Design News Editor
