Recently, I found myself wondering what really makes design feel alive.
In the early 2000s, I was recruited to join the Nokia rebrand team, a crack squad of some of London’s best designers.
Two of my cohort went on to become Pentagram partners. A few of the younger, second-wave recruits later founded DesignStudio. It was that kind of place — high energy, high pressure, and full of brilliant people.
We worked crazy hours — often 80-hour weeks — sometimes staying in hotels just to save time. It sounds insane now, but that was the culture many of us were used to. Not necessarily a good thing, but it built something special: a strong sense of culture and camaraderie. Six or seven of us still meet up a couple of times a year.
I was thinking about that time — and how a couple of years later, the birth of the smartphone was, in many ways, the death of the phone as an object of design.
Before the smartphone, phones had character. Nokia, especially, were putting out wild ideas — sliders, twists, curves, colours, physical buttons that made each model feel like a small sculpture in your hand. Quite often, totally impractical, but each one felt like the result of someone’s genuine idea, not a one-size-fits-all approach.
Then came the smartphone. Revolutionary in what it could do, but reductive in what it was. The moment the screen swallowed the object, design became a race for optimisation rather than imagination.
Since then, almost every phone has looked the same for nearly two decades — a black slab of glass with rounded corners. Function won. Personality lost.
I’m not saying I’d trade my iPhone for a 3210. But I do miss when design had soul, when it invited you to feel something.
That’s what we’re trying to do at Art of Ping Pong.
To put a bit of soul into our objects.
To remind ourselves that design isn’t just about how something works and what you do with it — it’s about how it makes us feel when we hold it, play with it, live with it, or just look at it. Because when design has soul, it invites us to play.
Not just with the object, but with ideas, imagination, and each other…
Here’s to design with soul, and the moments of play it inspires.
