Hello.

- Waka Kotahi | NZ Transport Agency -

Giving passengers a way to speak up without speaking at all

At a time when the uses of phones were expanding and the boundaries of that use were blurring, social etiquette around phones was racing to catch up. We found that young people wanted to be considerate of others when it came to their phone use generally. But in cars, their passengers were uncomfortable when they used their phone behind the wheel. 

Using their silent discomfort, passengers became a vehicle for us to shape social etiquette by making not using your phone when driving an act of passenger care. Brought to life through the act of intercepting a driver’s hand before it reached their phone – ‘phone-palming’ – this simple, non-verbal request approach gave passengers a way to make their discomfort visible and literally put themselves before the phone.

A sharable web film was seeded with two radio stations. In a week, the film had 52,000,000 views, and 1,000,000 shares, with countless people tagging drivers directly, giving them the message before the next time they even got in their cars.