FAIRPHONE | The World's First Modular Smartphone (Fairphone 2) | 2017
Making you want to pull your phone apart on a café table / FAIRPHONE "THE WORLD'S FIRST MODULAR SMARTPHONE"
A phone whose screen pops off in 20 seconds, no tools needed. In an industry where keeping a phone's insides a black box was the norm, Fairphone chose to show everything on purpose.
The problem
The Dutch startup Fairphone was founded in 2013 as a social enterprise with a mission to build "fair" smartphones that don't rely on conflict minerals.
The insight
The inside of a phone had always been treated as forbidden territory, somewhere you simply weren't supposed to open up. Seymourpowell flipped that idea, focusing instead on the moment an owner might actually want to take their phone apart and show it off. They built the design around what you could call a "café moment": setting the phone on a table with friends and having it spark a conversation.
The idea
The answer was the Fairphone 2, the world's first modular smartphone sold commercially. The battery, screen, camera, speakers and other parts are all independent modules, and the screen can be swapped out in 20 seconds with no tools at all. Underneath the semi-transparent case, graphics on the circuit boards and icons showing how to take the phone apart are built right in, turning the device itself into a storytelling tool that explains what fair electronics really means.
What happened
The phone scored a perfect 10 out of 10 on iFixit's repairability rating, the highest ever recorded at the time. It also won a D&AD White Pencil and a Cannes Lions Gold in Product Design (Sustainability & Environmental Impact), taking home both honors.
Afterthought
While Google was pouring huge amounts of money into chasing a modular phone with Project Ara, a small Dutch startup beat them to it and put the real thing on store shelves first. I think the reason they got there before the tech giant did comes down to a shift in thinking: instead of competing on specs, they made the simple fact that you *could* open the phone into the whole point.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2017
