A DEVICE designed by Scottish students to measure the amount of time people spend on their phones in pubs has won a design award in China.

Three Dundee University students have landed themselves a top spot in the Shenzhen Design Award for Young Talents, an international UNESCO competition.

Their device, called the Sociometer, has the look of a seismograph and records the bandwidth data being used by phones on graph paper.

Tiernan Haugh, Jamie Spratt and Campbell Scanlan, are currently studying at the university’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD). They were inspired by the 120-year-old Speedwell Bar to capture this social phenomenon.

Haugh, a digital-interaction design student, said: “People talk about how younger generations are becoming more content spending time on their phones than indulging in conversation, so we wanted to design something to measure that.”