A couple years back, Ismail Salhi, a designer from Paris, was cooking dinner after a long day of working in front of his computer. His eyes ached from staring at LCDs. But when he reached for his laptop to put on some music, he had an upsetting realization. All of his songs were–cue the horror movie strings–trapped behind yet another screen.

It got the designer thinking about how our media consumption has changed in recent years. “Fifteen years ago I could just grab a record and play it almost instantly,” he says. “Now I have to launch apps, plug in cables and scroll through lists to play a single song.” It wasn’t just the fussy complexity that bothered him. It was how soulless the whole ritual had become. In trading our record collections for so many files and folders, we’d lost the simple, almost soothing joy that comes with handling physical stuff.

Salhi’s answer to this modern predicament is Qleek, in essence a bid to give digital media a new, material form. The system, designed by Salhi’s co-founder, Johanna Hartzheim, is based around hexagonal wooden discs called Tapps. You can link Tapps up to music, photos or videos, and play the associated files simply by placing the them in a cradle connected to your TVs or speakers. The NFC-embedded wooden cards don’t actually hold the files, they just point the player to them, so you could have Tapps for dynamic content like Spotify playlists, podcasts, and Instagram feeds, too. Think of them not as storage so much as bookmarks.

Qleek, Salhi says, is about “bridging the gap between the physical and the digital.” It goes beyond how we experience our entertainment to how we relate to it at large. Salhi imagines people showing off their virtual collections by arranging Tapps on their walls in sprawling formations–an new sort of bookshelf for the file system era. He envisions collectors thumbing through their wooden chips to rediscover once-favorite albums and friends swapping Tapps instead of Dropbox links.

Salhi’s hardly the first designer to suggest that digital systems, for all their flexibility and power, might benefit from taking forms we can touch and hold. Durrell Bishop’s Marble Answer Machine, from 1992, was a seminal early example of a tangible UI, as they’ve come to be called. By using marbles to represent individual voicemail messages, Bishop’s concept made an invisible world immediately graspable.

Qleek’s design was informed even more directly by Martin Weiser and his concept of calm computing. Writing in 1996, Weiser, a designer out of Xerox PARC, the R&D lab that birthed the graphical user interface and the computer “desktop,” astutely observed that the era of the personal computer was giving way to one in which we could expect to interact with countless computers at every point throughout our day. This new era of “ubiquitous computing,” as Weiser deemed it, called for technologies that faded into the background rather than demanding our attention. “Calmness,” he wrote, “is a fundamental challenge for all technological design of the next fifty years.”

By freeing digital stuff from your computer screen–and the blinking, buzzing world behind it–Qleek aims to a degree of this calm to media consumption. As nice as it sounds, however, it may be a hard sell. Salhi and his collaborators just kicked off an Indiegogo campaign, asking $200 for a Qleek player and three reprogrammable tags. That’s not cheap–and cheap is one thing digital media is, soulless as it may be. Plus, as with all proprietary hardware, you have to worry about interoperability. Anyone can view pictures you send them on Dropbox, but if a friend doesn’t have the Qleek player, the elegant little Tapp you give them is about as useful as a coaster.

Still, conceptually speaking, this is a ripe area for exploration. Today, digital media collects as inevitably as dust, and its growth rates swell each year. The tools for processing all that stuff–for actually appreciating all your songs, your pictures, your videos–haven’t matured apace. The perfectly tagged iTunes library and the fastidiously organized iPhoto archive are a nice fantasy, but they’re largely that. In reality, most of our digital lives remain scattered across files, folders, devices, and drives both in clouds and bedroom closets. As easy as it is to collect digital stuff, it’s just as easy to lose track of it. My parents have albums and photographs from the 1970s. I’m not sure I have the pictures from my last iPhone.

Of course, it’s a marvel that we can create and consume all this stuff with such ease in the first place. We shouldn’t take that for granted. But now that we’ve arrived in a world of instant access and infinite capacity, the next great challenge is coming up with more sane, more sensible, and perhaps even more surprising ways of enjoying it all.