CHP...? Jewelry

Devices have taken over our lives. According to research, the average smartphone user checks their phone 221 times a day. As Jacob Weisberg suggested in a recent article in The New York Review of Books, we have all turned into ‘device people’ and our transformation into device people has happened with unprecedented suddenness. The first iPhones went on sale in June 2007. Today, not carrying a smartphone indicates eccentricity, social marginalization, or old age. The omnipresent screen culture is responsible for a social transformation. The chat app is what the cigarette was in the last century: a symbolic consumption good that makes a significant contribution to the running of the economy. But somewhere in the system are hidden costs that cannot be felt immediately. In the case of the cigarette, lungs are slowly destroyed. But what is the hidden cost of becoming device people? And how can a piece of jewelry respond to this transformation? 

CHP…?, the jewelry brand run by Gijs Bakker and based in Amsterdam, invited five international designers to reflect on this theme by making an exclusive design for CHP…? This resulted in six designs and one installation.