Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our second movie from Eindhoven, Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Dave Hakkens explains his concept for a modular mobile phone made of detachable blocks, an idea that looks set to become a reality now he has teamed up with Motorola.
Phonebloks is a concept for a mobile phone made of swappable components that fit together like blocks of Lego.
"It is basically made to be upgraded and repaired," explains Hakkens, who was speaking at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduation show during Dutch Design Week last week, before his collaboration with Motorola was revealed.
"Usually we throw [a mobile phone] away after a couple of years, but this one is made to last."
He continues: "You throw away a lot of good components [when you throw away a phone], because usually it's only one item that is broken. With this phone you can only throw away components that are actually broken, or need repairing or upgrading."
"If it's getting slow you only upgrade the speed component, if you need a better camera you only upgrade the camera component. In this way you can keep the good stuff and the bad stuff you upgrade."
The video of the concept Hakkens posted on YouTube quickly went viral, attracting over 16 million views.
"I'm just one guy at the Design Academy, I can't make this phone myself," says Hakkens. "So I put this video online and in the first 24 hours I had one million views on YouTube. I got a lot of nice emails from companies and people who want to work on this."
Hakkens also put the project on Thunderclap, a crowdspeaking site where supporters donate their social reach rather than money.
His Phonebloks Thunderclap campaign closed yesterday, having gained 979,280 supporters. On closing, an automatic message about Phonebloks was sent out to all of his supporters' social media contacts, reaching over 380 million people.
The approach has been successful in getting the attention of major players in the mobile phone industry.
Yesterday he posted a new video on his Phonebloks website, announcing that he has teamed up with American communications giant Motorola, which has been working on its own modular mobile phone concept called Project Ara for the last year.
"The whole point was to generate a lot of buzz," says Hakkens. "So companies see that there's a huge market and they need to make a phone like this."
We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y'Skid.
You can listen to more music by Y'Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.
