To Be Clear
Phone (1) by Nothing (image: Fabian Frinzel).
“Transparency significantly increases the design workload,” says Adam Bates, design director of London-based tech company Nothing. To demonstrate his point, he flicks over the studio’s new Phone (1) smartphone, revealing its seethrough construction. “There’s a whole new set of surfaces, finishes, textures and components to work with. Things that are usually hidden are suddenly right in front of you.”
In illustration, Bates points to a precise white form, nestled beneath the phone’s limpid glass surface. “A flexible PCB [printed circuit board] is beautiful in its own way, but if you took the back off another smartphone, it wouldn’t look like that,” explains Bates. “We have had to work to achieve that.” Warming to his theme, he points out a charging coil, as well as a battery peeking out from under electrical elements. “With transparency, decisions that usually just factor in function, quality and reliability also have to consider design.”
Transparency is the design signature of Nothing, a tech startup founded in 2020 by entrepreneur Carl Pei and electronics company Teenage Engineering. The company debuted with a set of wireless earphones, Ear (1), and has now stepped into smartphones with Phone (1): a device billed as eschewing pointless feature creep in favour of unique hardware design. “Lately, it feels like after a slew of more and more similar products, and more and more uninspiring products,” Pei narrates in the launch video for Phone (1), “that somehow the smartphone revolution had ended.”
The design aim with Phone (1), Bates explains, is to restore “surprise and fun” to a typology that has been “formalised into a very effective and functional archetype”. Transparency is one means of achieving this, not least for its contrast to the black box design of the industry’s biggest players. “Even if only subconsciously, it gives you a sense of what these things are actually made up of,” says Bates. This, of course, also creates risk. Physical transparency does not equate to transparency in a company’s supply chains, the conditions of its labour force, or the environmental impact of its products – how much does the smartphone industry really want consumers looking beneath the surface? These issues are thornier than any perceived staleness in new designs, but Nothing is at least trying to be more transparent here also. Phone (1) is made from recycled aluminium, for example, and more than 50 per cent of its internal plastic components are bio-based or recycled post-consumer waste. The team say that they will also work to extend the lifespan of its devices through regular software updates. “We want people to stick with this phone as long as possible,” Bates summarises.
These are simply the challenges of working in smartphones – a world that prizes the rapid churn of devices through an iterative mode of annual releases that runs counter to the design values that Nothing hopes to embody. “Transparency is about being open and showing things that others perhaps don’t,” Bates explains, but he is under no illusions about the challenges ahead. What happens, for example, when the market and investors demand a Phone (2)? “That’s what you should be losing sleep over as a designer,” he says. “How are we going to do this again? How are we going to surprise ourselves?”
Words Oli Stratford
Photographs Fabian Frinzel
This article was originally published in Disegno #34. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.