This project began in response to Australia’s ban on social media for under-16s. Months later, 61–75% of restricted adolescents (12–15 yrs) continued to access social media accounts. Holm offers an alternative to banning. It gives pre-teens the chance to build intentional device habits before a phone comes into the picture.
It's not a phone.
A phone is a teen's whole world
It is their music, their friends, and their downtime, all optimized by short-form feeds to capture every spare minute for engagement and data.
Parents I interviewed could all see the harm, and almost none had found restriction effective, because the same device causing it was their child's main link to friends. The largest study of school phone bans reached the same conclusion: take the device away and the want just finds another route.
32%
of adolescents report difficulty concentrating, remembering, and making
decisions, linked to passive screen behavior.
$11B
in annual profits to media companies from this attention economy.
80%
of that profit derived from minors.
One input, infinite directions.
Search only returns what they already know to ask for. Scrolling hands the choice to an algorithm, tuned to keep them watching rather than to show them something new.
Turning the dial moves through every station in range, in order, with nothing ranked or recommended. What comes next isn't shaped by past behavior.
From blueprint to prototype
The system went through renders, physical mockups, and working models before landing on the final build.
Designing a carrier that is portable and able to stand on its own, for the roughhouse play in children. Magnets were used to understand tactility and ease of use.
The materials settled on aluminum, which allowed radio waves to travel through and let the electronics be stored completely inside. That sealed, sturdy shell connects back to the roughhouse play of kids.
I mapped Holm around the four things a pre-teen actually does with a device: listen, carry, connect, and charge. Each step got a physical answer instead of a screen, building intentional use and mature device habits.
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The box talks to two people. The words are for parents, the colors are for kids.
Holm exhibited publicly alongside screen-based work, and visitors picked it up, tuned it, and pulled the companion from its dock unprompted. The prototype consisted of a radio built with Adafruit's RP2040 Prop-Maker Feather and a sub-GHz radio module along with a set of walkie-talkies to simulate the companion.
