Almost all courses taught at Institute of Design have some kind of corporate sponsor. This gives the students real-world problems to innovate against, and gives the sponsors, new ideas to take back to their teams. It’s a win win. For this course in prototyping, the sponsor was T-Mobile’s hardware innovation group. Back in 2010, T-Mobile’s business was commodifying, with unlimited text and talk becoming greens fees for mobile accounts. What wasn’t yet commodified was data. T-Mobile thought that increasing data consumption in families was a strategy they wanted to explore. The brief? Design a data enabled mobile phone for kids.

As a parent of a 10-year old, I was already struggling with the “Dad, I need a phone!” arguments, and I already had some insight that my younger classmates did not. we did some initial prototypes focusing on ruggedness, but the results were uninspiring. Most of my classmates presented ideas that tried to position the mobile phone as a learning device, compatible with the classroom.

Finding the Insight

I realized that I needed to do some more research to understand the complexities of kids and cellphones. I decided to talk to my son’s teachers to gauge their openness to devices in the classroom, and I wanted to talk to kids themselves and their parents to find out why they wanted a phone. What I learned was eye opening. My son’s teachers were horrified at the idea. “Over my dead body,” one math teacher said. Phones were a distraction, and they already had a policy of confiscating phones if they came out during the school day. The hostility to phones in the classroom was unanimous among teachers. It added complexity and distraction to their classroom, and many expressed frustration with parents who felt they had a right to be in contact with their kids. The parents I talked to were wary of their kids owning a phone, but felt they wanted to be in touch with their kids to coordinate after school activities. Finally we talked to the kids themselves and what we learned was eye-opening.

When we asked kids who they wanted to call, the only people they called was their parents, and then it was one of three conversations:

“Mom, come pick me up.”
“Mom, where are you?”
“Mom, I’m going to [friend]’s house.”

Clearly what they need was not a phone, but a device that could used to text their friends and family.

Designing Bandit

We quickly began to develop some principles for this new device:

It should be able to send and receive text and data, as well as voice.
It should be obvious when it was being used, so teachers could immediately see if their student was distracted.
It should be rugged and preferably attached to the kid, so it couldn’t be easily lost or left at a friend’s house.
It should be GPS-enabled, so parents could know where their kids are.

We figured that voice recognition as a text input option would make it obvious when the kid was using the device, making it nearly impossible to use during class. We decided to make it a wrist-mounted wearable with timekeeping functions, so kids wouldn’t lose it. We designed it to be able to have custom straps and faces so kids could personalize their device. Finally we added a feature that would allow kids to record notes ahead of time, and using RFID, transfer the message when two of the devices were in close proximity. We called the product “Bandit.”

Fast forward 5 years, and Apple released it’s celebrated Apple Watch. We were astounded at how similar the product was to Bandit. While our design was much cruder, we still anticipated many of the features of Apple Watch:

Voice recognition text input (Apple built the watch with Siri onboard)
Rectangular design to maximize space.
A scroll bar for fast scrolling that could be pushed to activate a choice (Apple used the Digital Crown—a more elegant solution)
A touch screen
Interchangeable straps and faces
GPS onboard
Complications in the corners of the interface
RFID (ours was for messaging, Apple’s was for ApplePay)

We presented the idea to T-Mobile and they loved it. However with the advent of the second generation of the iPhone, T-Mobile decided to shut down their internal hardware group and focus on reselling the iPhone.

There were a few technologies that weren’t yet mature enough for Bandit to become a reality. The first versions of Apple Watch had to be in proximity to an iPhone, as the eSIM had not yet matured. But we knew that SIMs were getting smaller and would eventually disappear.

Upon reflection, it is interesting to see how Bandit was ahead of its time from a mental health perspective. Jonathan Haidt, in his new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, outlines a compelling argument of how the “phone-based childhood” is creating social isolation, distraction and sleep deprivation among GenZ and Gen-Alpha. Given our excitement and naivety of the effect of smartphones on kids’ developing brains, a more limited device like Bandit would have eliminated many of Haidt’s concerns, since it did not have unlimited access to the Internet, and no social media.