A new pop-up café in Vancouver, Canada is offering patrons a temporary escape from digital communication.
Julien Thomas, a Vancouver construction worker and social artist, is opening The Faraday Café in Vancouver’s Chinatown with assistance from Hughes Condon Marler Architects. The café, which will be open July 2-16, is named after the Faraday cage, an enclosure made of a conducting material that restricts the passage of electric fields. Patrons inside the café will not be able to use their cell phones or laptops.
The driving force behind the idea, says Thomas, is not to promote “anti-phone” culture but to give people a chance to reconnect with other people face-to-face without digital distractions.
“There is a whole generation of people in this country that don’t remember what life was like before Facebook,” Thomas told The Providence. “I think people are looking for opportunities to opt out and leave their phones behind.”
The inside of the café is lined with aluminum window mesh to shield electromagnetic signals and provide a unique visual appeal, The Chinatown Experiment said in a press release. However, initial testing revealed that small folds and gaps in the flowing, multilayered design of mesh walls and corridors were letting wireless signals sneak in, so Thomas and an architect partner added a large “cage” in the center of the space that is truly Wi-Fi free.
“When we can be reached at all times, I believe privacy is a privilege,” Thomas said. “People will want to go places where they can’t be reached, where Google can’t track them.”
