Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Hardware as a Service

This is a concept I've been noodling on while reading Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things.
He describes the current transition of our produced world from one of gizmos to one of spimes. His assertion that gizmos represent the period between 1989 and 2004, where we purchased products that had a relatively short lifespan of utility. How many cellphones have you bought in your lifetime? Why did you replace them? It is not hard to argue that humanity needs to work at sustainable technology. The epoch of spimes starts at 2004 with the transition to RFID. Now, at first, I was concerned about the privacy losses and exploitation that this technology enables. But, Mr. Sterling has seemed to embrace its inevibility and suggest that we utilize its tracking capabilities to create devices that not only determine space but also time (thus the word invention). I am fully committed to helping make this dream into our reality. Design products to be reclaimed as their usefulness wanes, hence, hardware as a service.

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