Tucking Technology In: Repair, Care and the Cosy Charger

Mainstream digital wellbeing advice has a willpower problem. App blockers, lock boxes, screen time dashboards, focus timers, and digital detox programmes all reinforce the same story: smartphones tempt us, the solution is better self-discipline, and failure to disconnect reflects a failure of self-control.

Recent work challenges this framing. Sara Van Bruyssel, for example, understands disconnection as care work. Putting devices aside can create space for rest, relationships, and the maintenance of everyday life. Disconnection becomes part of how we care for ourselves and others, not simply something we do to ourselves.

For people with ADHD, this shift could be profound. Stepping away from a device is rarely a matter of discipline alone: platform design, hyperfocus, time blindness, emotional regulation, and task-switching all shape disconnection. Rather than treating these difficulties as deficits, we might ask how disconnection could support different needs and relationships with technology.

Our earlier Screen Space Defacer explored this possibility by designing around fidgeting and sensory stimulation. What other needs might disconnection be designed around?

The Cosy Charger explores what it might mean to design disconnection around ritual and comfort. Put simply, it’s a wireless charger housed inside a miniature bed. The idea is for users to tuck their device beneath a knitted blanket and leave it there overnight.

Okay, yes: the Cosy Charger is basically sleep training for your phone. Why anthropomorphise a device that has no feelings? Because doing so adds emotional texture to an otherwise mundane act of disconnection. Tucking the phone into bed each night reframes putting it aside as an act of care rather than deprivation. Instead of shutting the device away, the user helps it rest.

The practical outcome is familiar: the phone leaves your hand and, eventually, you go to sleep. What changes is the meaning of the act. Media scholars have long examined how repeated acts of media use become rituals. Watching the six o’clock news with your family, for instance, matters not only for the content on screen, but because it marks a shared time, place, and way of being together. Why shouldn’t ritual also matter for media non-use? Tucking the phone in gives the day’s disconnection a sense of completion, transforming restriction into care, comfort, and closure.

And I thought that was the gist of the Cosy Charger. Until Coral Crissey joined the project.

Coral Crissey joined Saving Screen Time in September this year, and they have made the Cosy Charger even cooler. As an Associate Researcher and Crafting Connoisseur, Coral has taken the idea in a new material direction by building many of the beds from discarded technological objects rather than conventional craft materials. The headboards are made from cassette tapes (sleeping beauty!). A VHS tape forms the bed, while the blanket is knitted from discarded Air New Zealand earphones. How good huh?

Coral says reusing tech materials comes from the tradition of solarpunk. Although usually discussed as a literary and aesthetic movement, solarpunk imagines futures built through repair, maintenance, reuse, and collective care rather than endless cycles of extraction and replacement. Its worlds are populated by technologies that have been adapted, repaired, modified, and folded back into everyday life, showing that people have found new ways to live with what is already here.

Solarpunk challenges the short lives assigned to technological objects, which feels especially relevant to devices that become obsolete far too quickly (thank goodness USB-C is finally becoming standard). The Cosy Charger asks what other lives their leftovers might have. Cassette tapes become architecture; a VHS casing becomes furniture. Rather than being broken down or restored to their original function, these materials take on new forms while keeping their technological past visible.

The Cosy Charger also intersects with repair culture. As Steven Jackson famously argues, technologies endure through continuous, largely invisible acts of repair and maintenance, as opposed to constant innovation. Ever had a smashed smartphone screen fixed? That is repair culture in its most familiar form.

Yet repair is often associated with the technician, hacker, or tinkerer, and valued for restoring an object to function. The Cosy Charger complicates this story by combining salvaged electronics with domestic craft and textile work. Knitted blankets sit alongside technological leftovers; comfort becomes as important as function.

The beds therefore bring together traditions often gendered differently: masculine-coded repair and feminised practices of making, nurturing, and care.

And we are producing downloadable instructions so that people can build their own Cosy Chargers!! The aim is not simply to share an object, but to invite others into the practices of salvaging, making, and caring for technology.

This invitation to adapt and remake technology connects the Cosy Charger to crip technoscience. Rather than treating disabled and neurodivergent people as users who must adapt to existing systems, crip technoscience foregrounds them as tinkerers, modifiers, and world-builders.

One commitment of the Crip Technoscience Manifesto is interdependence as a political technology: a rejection of independence as the ideal relationship between bodies, people, and technologies. Disabled people do not simply use technology or seek freedom from it; they rely on, alter, and invent new relationships with technological worlds.

Celebrating interdependence has obvious ramifications for digital disconnection. I mean, disconnecting is mostly understood as withdrawal right? So much of this digital advice imagines freedom as independence from technology: fewer devices, fewer dependencies, greater self-control blah blah blah, whereas crip technoscience asks for the opposite: how technological interdependencies might become more liveable, accessible, and caring.

The Cosy Charger is all about that interdependence. Rather than promising freedom from technology, it reshapes our ongoing relationships with it: discarded devices are remade through repair, craft, and care, while disconnection is ritualised as another way of living with technology.

So go on, tuck your phone into bed. Have a cuppa while you’re at it. Light a candle, too. Sometimes caring for technology means knowing when to put it to rest.