Johanna Nieminen, a student at the Aalto University School of Art and Design in Finland, created an exhibit titled “Disconnected Holidays” for her MA Industrial and Strategic Design Program. The concept is devastatingly simple. Say you’re going to go on a holiday, and you don’t want to be plagued by the constant beeping and buzzing of your mobile phone. You just load disconnectedholidays.com (not a working URL) into your browser and enter in your home address, they send you a box, you put your mobile phone inside, mail it off, and then it’ll be mailed back to you after a few days.
Johanna was inspired by the “emptiness” of the northern region of Finland known as Lapland, and its “isolating character”, when coming up with her project. She says:
Today’s world demands its citizens to play an active role in different kinds of communities, react and follow up on everything that happens in our surroundings. We are reachable by diverse means of communication 24/7. E-mails are read several times a day, the mobile phone is always with us. At the same time, we are connected to Facebook or other social networks.
When we get home from work, we switch on television, computer and radio. We are drowning in the social noise surrounding us. Even during the holidays many people report having problems with disconnecting from work—because they of course took with them the mobile phone and laptop.
For many of you ADD afflicted, mobile phone addicted, “need to be in the loop” type of people, this concept of wanting to be disconnected seems straight up barbaric, but for Finland, one of the first countries in the world to have mobile phones, this shows a future all advanced countries are heading towards.
When Rudy De Waele from M-Trends asked me to give him 5 trends that we’re going to see during the next decade for his “Mobile Trends 2020” project, one of my predictions was:
Rich nations will start seeing the number of hours people spend in front of screens decline for the first time and the masses will limit or stop use a certain technology or service to reconnect with the joys of overcoming an obstacle.
It’s counterintuitive to what everyone is saying right now, that we’re all spending more and more and more time online, and the number of hours we spend in front of a screen will only go up, but someone needs to stand on the opposing side of this march toward connected chaos. Whether it’s the “Web 2.0 Suicide Machine“, or The New York Times article on people who elect to operate in today’s world without a mobile phone, there is a growing trend that people have had enough with being connected and available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
To quote Karl Lagerfeld, German fashion designer, who recently gave an interview to Vice:
I’m not a chambermaid whom you can ring at every moment. Today, you know, most people act like they work at a switchboard in a hotel.
Personally, if it wasn’t for IntoMobile.com, I’d probably throw my laptop and mobile phone into the nearest river.
[Via: Textually]