Hulger Phones - Hulger

HULGER PHONES

2002-2008

The Hulger Phone project really started in 2002 when Nicolas Roope hacked a vintage 1970’s phone and repurposed the handset to be used as a hands free set with a mobile phone. The first documented evidence of this hack was a small feature in the UK’s Design Week in April 2002. The original name for the company was Pokia, although the name was changed to Hulger after Nokia took exception to an international trademark application. It was an understandable challenge, although ten thousand handsets were about to be produced in the following days with Pokia emblazoned across their handles. The mould was promptly changed. Pokia lived on in the “P” motif in the headphone part of the handset, as well as in the product naming convention of everything started with a P.

The Hulger phone idea was a cultural hack, a kind of punk statement that reacted against communication technologies that were miniaturising and complicating at an alarming rate. Over the course of a decade we’d all become habitual users of mobile technologies but even the most dextrous of us struggled to fathom the millions of superfluous functions and tiny buttons. We were all dependent and yet the products being offered were beginning to alienate these very same users. Hulger phones came before the iPhone opened a new chapter in mobile devices, and calling and texting became less defining in a new universe of apps. The era of un-usable, un-useful mobile phones was over when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone. This was also the moment when the potency in the Hulger Phone idea evaporated. Suddenly, once again we could fall in love with mobile devices and their beautifully choreographed, juicy, pressable buttons and gestural interfaces that brought art and poetry to a whole new category of experiences and services. The big retro phone era continued but only as cheap, colourful, disposable gizmos that found their way into every electronics retailer the world over. The Hulger Phone statement had been assimilated and diluted to the point where the sentiment had gone and rather than pointing towards an ambition to create more sustainable and timeless technologies, they merely became stocking fillers that ultimately just added volume to the landfill. Significant business was made by the thousands of Hulger Phone copies but the company had moved on to a new problem to solve, with an idea that could last.

Hulger’s phones, together with the Pokia idea before them, received global media coverage across broadsheets, television, magazines, blogs etc for several years. They appeared in the seminal “Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibition at the MoMA and stayed on at the museum’s study collection.

When Hulger embarked on the project, the company made a clear pact to use this noisy idea to drive through an agenda that would force a renegotiation between technology, design and the consumer. HULGER phones delivered the first chapter of this journey, building an international brand that would form the platform on which PLUMEN would be built, a project that would more directly tackle the problems around waste and consumption by engaging the power of artistic and deep design thinking.