Light Phone raised $400,000 and sold 15,000 units, at $150 each, before Tang and Hollier put a stop on orders. Its backers on Kickstarter didn't see it that way. It was more like an artistic statement: Look at how anxious you are without your phone. "We were not trying to compete with any smartphone when we started," says Tang. It wasn't designed to be a consumer product so much as an experiment. Tang and Hollier blueprinted it in the incubator, then launched it on Kickstarter in June of 2015. This would be, as Tang likes to call it, a "tool." So no, this wouldn't be a phone, not the kind you're used to. Some research suggests that just seeing one on a table-face down, turned off-makes us distracted and unhappy. A phone is a thing that makes us anxious, something we reach for like a nervous tick. Tang and Hollier are both designers, and the first thing they agreed on is that they should not crib from conventional phone design. The original Light Phone was small, barely bigger than a credit card, with a light-up dial pad that made the handset look like a calculator. Now Tang and Hollier hope to change that by offering the next thing: Light Phone II. But with a limited address book of nine numbers and the singular ability to make phone calls, this was never going to become your permanent phone. The Light Phone promised a reprieve from the travails of modern technology, if only temporarily. More like a cell connection in case of emergencies, or a pager. It didn't look like a phone because it wasn't supposed to be one. For days, or even a few blissful hours, when you need a break from your always-on, attention-stealing, dopamine-overload smartphone. For the family vacation when everyone you need is there IRL. The Light Phone, back then, was meant to be your "phone away from phone." For the jaunt upstate when you'd really rather not check your email. Hollier, an artist and designer, created the first version of this device in 2015 with fellow designer Kaiwei Tang. To see it in his hand, or pressed up to his ear, looks as much like using a phone as pretending to call Pizza Hut with a ripe banana. He carries around a pocketable device, the color of graphite, that makes calls and sends text messages and does little else. At least, without anything you'd recognize as a phone. For half a year, Joe Hollier has been living without a phone.
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