Qleek (2014) by Johanna Hartzheim, Pierre-Rudolf Gerlach, and Ismail Salhi on Indiegogo

A couple years back, Ismail Salhi, a designer from Paris, was cooking dinner after a long day of working in front of his computer. His eyes ached from staring at LCDs. But when he reached for his laptop to put on some music, he had an upsetting realization. All of his songs were–cue the horror movie strings–trapped behind yet another screen.

It got the designer thinking about how our media consumption has changed in recent years. “Fifteen years ago I could just grab a record and play it almost instantly,” he says. “Now I have to launch apps, plug in cables and scroll through lists to play a single song.” It wasn’t just the fussy complexity that bothered him. It was how soulless the whole ritual had become. In trading our record collections for so many files and folders, we’d lost the simple, almost soothing joy that comes with handling physical stuff.

Salhi’s answer to this modern predicament is Qleek, in essence a bid to give digital media a new, material form. The system, designed by Salhi’s co-founder, Johanna Hartzheim, is based around hexagonal wooden discs called Tapps. You can link Tapps up to music, photos or videos, and play the associated files simply by placing the them in a cradle connected to your TVs or speakers. The NFC-embedded wooden cards don’t actually hold the files, they just point the player to them, so you could have Tapps for dynamic content like Spotify playlists, podcasts, and Instagram feeds, too. Think of them not as storage so much as bookmarks.