Leading design and innovation consultancy Seymourpowell have created four 'modular tech’ concepts that look to transform the world of product development as we know it. The concepts take Google’s Project Ara open hardware platform as a starting point and expand it far beyond smartphones to demonstrate how a vast array of products could be brought to market quicker and cheaper, and be tailored more to the needs of individual consumers.
Matthew Cockerill, creative director at Seymourpowell explains, “Google describe how the success of its open hardware platform, Ara, is based ‘on a rich, vibrant, and diverse ecosystem of modules from a myriad of developers’, but Ara is limited to smartphones. We imagined a world where a similar approach could transform the development of just about any new product from an expensive and slow process to a more streamlined process that both established and start-up product developers could take advantage of."
Apple and Sony have explored modular products in the past and Fairphone and LG have successfully brought modular smartphones to market, indicating consumers’ appetite for flexible products that can be customised and repaired easily by using a modular approach. Seymourpowell believe that opening up the hardware platform beyond smartphones could trigger a new product development revolution.
Seymourpowell have demonstrated their thinking using four concepts called Move, Wear, Link and Play that show the opportunities an open hardware platform could bring to individual module makers, medical institutions, agricultural businesses and musicians.
Matthew Cockerill adds, “The concepts combine a set of standard modules with more specialist modules sourced from a diverse module marketplace with contributions from well-known brands and entrepreneurial start-ups alike. This would allow developers to create exciting new products relatively easily by reduce the amount of development time, risk and cost to get products to market at a pace not possible up to now. This would radically change how new products are conceived and developed, and give consumers almost infinite choice in how they customise and tailor-make their products to suit their individual needs.”
Here we see ‘Wear’, a wearable device that addresses a patient's medical needs, through biometric monitoring and their emotional needs with an instant connection to medical staff and access to their treatment timeline. It is conceived as a reconfigurable system that adapts to different stages of their treatment journey by the hospital. In the concept shown the device transforms for a pregnant woman throughout the stages of pregnancy and beyond, from a belly worn tocometer to measure contractions and communicate with the hospital in early labour, to a device that measures heart rate, stress levels and drug delivery, and later a device to facilitate the emotional connection between mother and baby by sharing each other’s heart beats and live images when they are not in direct contact.
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