What Makes Your Phone Ring

In spring 2025, I launched a project with Der Spiegel and their "Data & Visualization" department. My idea was to make the components of the very device reading the article visible to the user. Readers would get a look inside their own smartphone, specifically at the parts that rely on rare earth elements. Using their own device as the lens, the piece would show just how dependent smartphone production is on China, since these materials are almost exclusively sourced there. After intensive research with manufacturers and Chinese blueprints of smartphone models, I turned the article into a scroll story. Users could choose from 12 different smartphone models, iPhones, Samsung Galaxys, and Fairphones. For the X-ray look of the phones, I spent a long time hunting for CT scans and eventually found what I needed at iFixit. For the visualization, I wrote a custom renderer in WebGL that displays the CT scan models as voxels in the browser, keeping resource usage low. You can see how that works here.

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