Taking lessons from Lego, HMD vows to make a phone to break ‘evil loop of dopamine release’

A former Lego executive is taking lessons he learnt from spending almost a decade working for the Danish toy company to spearhead the push for a “better phone” for children, and smash the “evil loop of dopamine release” that glues young people to their screens.

Australia will impose the strictest laws in the world for social media, banning children under the age of 16 from using popular platforms including Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat – and will fine tech giants up to $50m if they fail to comply.

Many parents say the government’s action has finally allowed them to push back on giving their children a smartphone and engaging in the potentially harmful effects of social media, such as bullying. A survey from HMD – the phone maker that revived Nokia’s classic “dumb phones” and has its own range of smartphones – revealed 54 per cent of Australian parents wanted more guidance and support.

But tech experts have questioned how the ban will work, with Facebook saying it may be forced to capture children’s biometric data.

Lars Silberbauer spent much of the past decade at Lego, including serving as senior global director of digital. He is now chief marketing officer at HMD, heading a campaign to design a “better phone” for children.

The new phone is set to be released next year and aims to soothe anxiety about the potential toxic consequences of too much screen time on developing minds, and its development has included surveying more than 10,000 parents across the globe.

“The whole approach is kind of like taking out the Lego playbook we created back in the days, like a platform called Lego ideas,” Mr Silberbauer told The Australian.

“Instead of just doing Lego sets, we opened the whole innovation process and said ‘what ideas do you have?’ We can see the creative power of the crowd.”

A big part of the concept – which follows HMD successfully lobbying the government to develop ‘right to repair’ laws – is what Mr Silberbauer describes as breaking the “evil loop of dopamine release”. While the company has developed the Barbie “dumb” flip phone with Mattel, he says there is “definitely not a solution in the market right now”.

“You want to excite kids, like this is something they actually want to use and not something they’re being pushed to use.

“Partners we’re working with like Mattel and so on, they of course want kids to have open-ended play, physical play and not end up in a game somewhere. And that’s where you can see the whole business model with our competitors that they make so much money on, like micropayments, app installs, gaming, really having all kinds of ages sitting on the phone being relentlessly in this like evil loop of dopamine release.

“We don’t need to make $1 trillion so we can create something that doesn’t need to tie both parents, teenagers and kids into those loops.”

Another similarity phones share with toys is the fact the customer and the user are different people.

“When you have products for teenagers and kids, you sell to the parents, but it’s the kids that are the users,” Mr Silberbauer said.

“So the customer and consumer are two different people, and that’s where we really want to investigate both of them and understand what are the differences and what are the true needs. And then we started to open that Pandora’s box. The big answer is, it is not simple. It is very, very complex.”

While social media is relatively straightforward, the design of the actual phone raises a host of challenges.

“No social media before a certain age, that’s one of the easy learnings but when it comes to camera or no camera, it’s basically 50:50 among parents and experts. Like ‘yes for the camera’ but it’s very private and it’s only allowed between the parent and the kids.

“But a lot of parents are also concerned. If you just have a camera, bad stuff can be recorded. It can be sent around and so on. I would say, the big learning from this last six months is it’s not been simple.

“There is definitely not a solution in the market right now that can solve this.”

Concept designs for a better phone have included smaller screens aimed at limiting excessive use, to promoting quick interactions like checking maps and answering calls.

The results of HMD’s survey found that 77 per cent of Australian parents think social media puts their children under too much pressure and is not good for their mental health. And 80 per cent would also like to see teachers educate children on the dangers of social media and ban phones in classrooms.

Crucially, 80 per cent also fear that smartphones expose their children to stranger danger with more than half admitting they don’t know what their children get up to using their phones.

“We’ve basically been through this crowd innovation process in six sessions where we really discussed every tiny little bit of detail on what would a better phone look like,” Mr Silberbauer said, adding that HMD will release more information at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March next year and expects to “have the phones in the hands of kids” later in 2025.

But HMD general manager of Australia and Oceania Brenden Folitarik says parents can also benefit, revealing he uses a Barbie phone on weekends to avoid unnecessary distractions from smartphones and work.

“I guess it’s also a by-product of working for a European company and the timezone, right? And being passionate about what I do means that I can fall into that trap of ‘oh, it’s just an email at 10 o’clock at night, or it’s just something on a Friday, Saturday’,” Mr Folitarik said.

“But I’ll put down my smartphone and pick up my dumb phone on a Friday night. As soon as I’m done, that’s it, when my brain says it’s time to be present with my partner, and then I won’t pick up my smartphone until Sunday or Monday. And I do that every week, every weekend, and I’ve been doing that now for the last two years.”

This article first appeared in The Australian.