A young Dutch designer reinvents the mobile phone (and experiments with everything else), writes Nina Siegal
When his digital camera broke during a vacation in Greece in 2012, the then 23-year-old student Dave Hakkens decided to take it apart and see what had gone wrong.
He found the source of the trouble: the lens motor had died. Hakkens contacted the manufacturer and learned that he couldn’t replace that single element of the camera.
He’d have to buy a whole new camera.
“At that point, I realized that that’s how it always goes with electronics,” he said. “When something is broken you can’t fix it anymore; you just have to buy a new one. I felt like I’d like to find something to change that.”
So, for his graduation project at the Eindhoven Design Academy, Hakkens decided to try to upgrade another piece of electronics almost everyone uses: the smartphone.
His concept was to design a modular telephone built of moveable blocks that would allow people to replace individual components of their phones separately. He called the idea “Phonebloks” and posted a short video explaining the idea on YouTube in September 2013.
Within 24 hours, the video had gone viral, with more than a million views.
Hakkens’ initial goal was to find 500 supporters for the project and some phone or technology company willing to get involved. In less than two months, he’d already engaged 800,000 people in a Thunderclap campaign to promote the idea to millions more via social media. His phone and email were buzzing with offers from potential business partners across the globe.
Then Google called. It turned out that its developers had been secretly working on a modular smartphone quite similar to Hakkens’ concept in their Advanced Technology and Projects group, under the name Project Ara. Hakkens was invited to the U.S. to see the work in progress, and Google offered him a job, he said. But he turned it down, and instead made a deal with Google that they would open up their product development to the public and allow him, and his new community of modular phone backers, to become part of the development process.
“It was a really nice offer, and a nice place in San Francisco, but when I thought about it I wasn’t interested in working for a phone company, and I didn’t really want to dedicate myself to one company either,” he said. “Phonebloks had a huge amount of interest in it, and we had to remain independent so we could let them know.”
There were other offers, too, including suggestions about how to leverage the popular support to raise capital and launch a competing venture, but Hakkens is that rare individual who isn’t particularly phased by promises of personal fortune.
“I guess my mind works more from what’s the best for the world, and not what makes you the most profit,” he said. “The idea right now is to keep things open and free, because that way everybody gets smarter and everybody wins.”
Hakkens is now 26, and though he’s significantly more famous he’s not substantially richer than when he was a student. He lives with his girlfriend in a soontobe-demolished house, and works in a studio in an “antikraak” industrial building, which means he pays nearly nothing because the landlords need to keep someone in there to prevent it from getting squatted.
He’s the kind of guy who likes to try new ways to do everything. On his blog, he reports on his 30day juice fasts and his shampoofree experiment. Over the winter, he convinced his girlfriend to get a Christmas tree to plant in their garden. When Christmas rolled around, they brought it inside the house for three weeks, then planted it outside again.
“I read that it’s really bad for the environment that people buy Christmas trees and then just throw them away,” he said.
The couple also adopted a chicken that lives in their yard, via a nonprofit organization that promotes sustainable farming. Previously, the chicken had been living on a farm in such confined quarters that it had lost all its feathers. Now it has its feathers back. “That was something we wanted to try out, that you can make a chicken happier again,” he said.
On the work front, Hakkens regularly visits Project Ara headquarters and reports back to his followers on social media. His Phonebloks site has become a kind of campaign headquarters for promoting electronics that produce less waste. (Project Ara, meanwhile, is planning to launch a limited market pilot of its modular phone this year.)
These days his primary focus is another project he began while at design school: recycling plastic into household items. He discovered that it’s actually quite easy to recycle plastic, but most plastics companies don’t want to, because the machines are enormous and expensive. So Hakkens decided to design a much smaller machine that could be placed somewhere like a community center. That way, individuals could bring in their own plastics and turn them into fun household objects, like lamps or chairs.
So far, he hasn’t gotten anywhere near as much support for his plastics machine as he did for Phonebloks. But he’s passionate about this idea on a personal level, admitting that “you might have to be a maker to find the plastic project interesting.”
For more information
Website: https://phonebloks.com/en
Video: http://www.sparknews.com/fr/video/phonebloksoneyearalready
