How can we claw our way out of bad screen time?

These are also problems of design. Starting with the Nokias and Blackberrys of the early 2000s and accelerating with the arrival of the iPhone and smartphones running Android OS, we have witnessed a great convergence, where the single-purpose objects that used to make up our lives – music players, cameras, calendars, notebooks – have been subsumed into one all-encompassing piece of hardware.

This one device to rule them all does everything, but it does no one thing particularly well. It’s a fine media player, not a great one. A fine e-book, wallet, timer, calculator, but not a great one. Worst of all, going to use any one of these tools opens up the danger of becoming distracted by another, especially any that have sent push notifications – curtailing you from performing your desired function before you’ve even started.

That is why, at the fringes of consumer technology, a movement towards device divergence has been quietly, haphazardly building for several years. This is especially true of Gen Z, which has embraced devices such as the Kodak Charmera, a digital keychain camera, and the viral homemade payment wand, recently adapted by tech company Cash App into a compact NFC-powered accessory for phone-free purchasing. This steady deconstruction of the smartphone led product design students at ECAL to imagine future versions of the device, including one designed as a modular keychain of charms at Milan Design Week 2026.