Phones don’t grow on trees

Published:

[Project Webiste](http://phones.dontgrowontre.es/) [Code on Github](https://github.com/CSJESC) We all use electronic devices in our everyday life and take them for granted, but we rarely ever think about where they come from, what they are made of and what human stories take place behind the scenes of the production chain. There are some media reports covering this topic, but they often seem very distant to us and do not make us question our own habits or force us to have second thoughts about the fact that these stories are actually connected to the devices we carry with us and use every day. That is why we also chose to not name a brand or factory in particular in our visuals: It does not really matter what company or device you use personally, since pretty much all devices have a problematic background. There are two main stories we focused on after a long process of researching and working ourselves through the data we gathered. Since we thought this report is the right place to bring up the stories we could not focus on anymore, you can read up on some of the things we gathered during our research phase and the struggles we had with those. Bearing this in mind, let’s have a closer look at the things we ended up actually having on the website. First, there is the “Discover” part of the project, which gives you an overview over the materials used in an average phone (or any modern device). We thought about a way to rank the materials, so that users not only know what they are but also where they come from and what they are used for. Since we could not find all the data on all the materials, we decided to make it open for users to edit. The “Game” part of the project is a text based adventure game, where you learn about the everyday life of a Chinese worker. There is no winning in this game since we figured that there is no good way of getting out of this situation, which we used as a way to emphasize on the situation of many workers in the tech industry in China. We additionally decided to not have a button that brings you back to the start of the game, so the user would have to go back themselves, putting more emphasis on the fact that in real life, you cannot undo your decisions and you will have to live with your past choices.