The Punkt phone, launched at the London design festival, lets you call and text. It also has nice buttons and is easy to hold. And that’s about it. Would you pay £219 for it?

“I think the ‘always on’ life is probably even worse than having a poor diet,” says Petter Neby, founder of Swiss consumer electronics company Punkt. “Every day we are consuming more trash, and becoming more detached from real life and the ability to deal with situations head-on. Just look around, it’s a disaster – and the sociological issue of our times.”

Neby is an ebullient man on a mission, an entrepreneur who wants us to rediscover the lost art of conversation and the spontaneous beauty of chance encounters. That’s why his company, founded in 2008, makes sleek and easy-to-use devices that do one thing very well, but nothing more, allowing you to focus on “having a life and living”, as he likes to say – something technology often derails.