Disconnected Connections

Service Design, 2026

Collaborator: Patricia Torres, Charmaine Chong
Programs used: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe InDesign

The term disconnected connections comes from Gen Z's frequent phubbing behaviour. It is the habit of reaching for your phone mid-conversation, mid-meal, mid-moment, formed habitually by social media algorithms engineered to keep you scrolling. The result is a generation that is more digitally connected than any before it, yet increasingly lonely in person. Online relationships feel abundant; offline ones feel harder to sustain. The phone sits between people, not as a bridge, but as a barrier.

Go Touch Grass is a competitive semi-digital board game designed as a direct response to this problem. Rather than asking players to put the phone away, it weaponises Gen Z's phone addiction entirely. Built around the internet and meme culture that raised this generation, the game uses NFC chip tapping to turn the one object you cannot put down into the object that serves as a communicator. Designed to pull people off their screens by placing the screen at the very centre of play, Go Touch Grass reframes the problem as the solution through using the language of the culture it critiques to get people to look up, lean in, and actually be in the room together.

Disconnected Connections

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