Jaren Goh and Isamu Sanada‘s unsolicited conceptual industrial designs indicate a shift in the relationship between consumers and hardware manufacturers. Their respective, speculative remixes of Sony Ericsson and Apple products are often better than the real thing…
In computing and media, trends in open-source, RSS, P2P and Web 2.0 are redefining those industries with the user’s needs and desires at the centre. User’s needs are met by an infinitely extensible and coupleable palette of components.
Jaren Goh’s Black Diamond concept phone is the perfect example – I want this product, as I’m sure many others do, why can’t Sony build it for me? Consumer electronics is still thinking in terms of hits whereas software is beginning to understand the potential of a long tail of niches.
With the emergence of open source hardware, blogjects, spimes and desktop fabbing, I hope we’ll soon see the notion of Situational Hardware emerge to accompany, what Shirky termed, Situational Software.
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