If These Were Gadgets

Instagram as a camera. WhatsApp as a walkie talkie. Netflix as a slide projector. That’s what Thomas Olivier designed—what modern apps would actually look like if someone had invented them in the 1980s, not as software but as physical objects you could hold.

The appeal isn’t just the retro look. It’s that these would kind of just work. A messaging app is basically a walkie talkie in digital form. A photo-sharing app is a camera with a network built in. Strip away the software layer and you’re left with something simple and functional, exactly what 80s design would have produced.

There’s something satisfying about that. We usually think of progress as moving away from physical objects, toward abstraction and immateriality—everything in the cloud, everything on screens. Olivier’s work flips that. It asks: what if the task was so fundamental that it needed its own dedicated machine? What if we never abstracted it away at all?

I’d want to own these things if they actually existed. Not as ironic retro pieces, but as tools. They’d be limited compared to modern apps, sure. But there’s something honest about that limitation. A camera that shares photos, full stop. No metrics, no engagement mechanics, no algorithmic manipulation. Just the one thing it was designed to do.

Looking at these designs makes me wonder what we traded and what we got in return. Convenience, maybe. A lot of convenience. But also a lot of friction in places there never used to be any. Olivier’s designs make that friction visible.