This beautiful, biophilic phone case is on a mission to reduce your screen time

It’s alive.

The Terrarium Phone Case by U.K.-based designer Daniel Idle is a clear iPhone 16 Pro Max case with a vertical terrarium designed to show off small plants growing inside.

“The idea came from noticing how personal phone cases have become,” Idle tells Fast Company. “People use them to carry objects, express themselves, and customize something they interact with all the time. That got me thinking about how much time we spend on our phones and how disconnected they make us feel from nature.”

To bring nature to this most unexpected of places, Idle wanted to see if a phone case could include living elements by building an ecosystem directly into it. He designed and modeled prototypes to test what it would take to make a usable case hospitable to plant growth.

It’s an example of biophilic design, or design that incorporates nature directly into its form. While often seen in nature-friendly architecture or interiors, the case shows there’s room for biophilic industrial design that brings nature to everyday consumer products too.

But it also presented its own challenge: balancing the functional needs of a phone case with the environmental needs of an ecosystem that could sustain plant life. Early prototypes didn’t provide enough support to keep the landscape stable and attached when handled. It had to be “durable enough to function as a handheld object rather than just a display piece,” Idle says.

The solution was a vertical terrarium with specialized sticky soil that’s stable enough to allow the phone to be physically moved around while the plants inside remain firmly secure.

The case is made from two pieces: the structural printed shell and the enclosed chamber, and it’s surprisingly low maintenance. It requires infrequent watering—just a small amount of water if the plants start to dry out; the case sustains itself through the condensation cycle of internal moisture.

In his own case, Idle grew small-scale plants well suited for enclosed terrarium environments, including moss, which works especially well since it creates an immediate sense of landscape at miniature scale and doesn’t take much upkeep.

He says the design is more of a conceptual piece at the moment but he’s looking at developing the idea commercially.

Amid growing worry over skyrocketing screen time, redesigned phone cases are cropping up as one potential solution. Cases that are too annoying to pick up or that shrink the actual screen get at the problem in their own ways, but the Terrarium Phone Case bets on built-in beauty to get people to set down their screens.

Photosynthesis requires sunlight, so to keep your miniature garden growing, the case needs screen-down time. Notifications will just have to wait.

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