White Spots: A Travel Guide To The Disconnected World

Winner of 2017 Dutch Design Award for the category Service & Systems, White Spots is an app that visualizes the invisible electromagnetic networks surrounding us, and takes you to the few disconnected spots that are left in this overly connected world.

A travel guide to the disconnected world, White Spots is a collaborative project by information designer Richard Vijgen, filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak and artist Jacqueline Hassink. In Virtual Reality mode, the app shows the digital networks surrounding you in real time. For those who do not have VR, it includes a world map that displays the divide between the connected and unconnected world.

Rather than showing national borders, the map indicates the location of White Spots — places without any Internet connection. By means of videos and photographs, you are taken to a journey through remote and unconnected places across the continents, from an isolated Sri Lankan tribe to a former Soviet mining town in the Arctic.

https://vimeo.com/162653831

For those who feel inspired, or who simply want to escape the omnipresence of the digital cloud, there is a route planner that directs to the nearest White Spot. But beware: once you enter a no-Internet zone, the app doesn’t guarantee you will ever be able to find your way back to the connected world.

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