Watch the video here:
Simone Cicero‘s original article has the transcript and explains the context:
“Few days ago, after the presentation of the joint venture between Phonebloks and Motorola, called Project Ara, that I pretty enthusiastically commented earlier on this blog, we reached out to Phonebloks website with a contact request. Surprisingly enough we got very soon a very kind response from Dave Hakkens, the original creator of the Phonebloks idea and campaign. While navigating hundreds of emails with ideas and inspirations and, in parallel, building the platform that will help Phonebloks keep it’s independent vision going on, Dave found out some time so sit down in front of an hangout and share some time with us, discussing the next steps and the key points behind this incredible project that holds amazing promises.
My impression after having this chat with Dave, is that he is really committed to make this project work according to the original vision, behind the collaboration with Motorola. This will be possible thanks to the power of the community that he put together in one of the most successful crowd support campaign ever. Now Dave (and the team at Phonebloks) is really committed to one key next step: designing a platform that will enable a large scale, probably the largest, co-design project in the history of product design.
In the future of the Phonebloks project, there are lots of challenges, as you’ll see by reading the interview transcript or by watching the video attached, ranging from keeping independence to creating new tools for people to collaborate on hardware designs.
Having worked for several years in the Smartphone industry and being an opens source advocate since a while now, I’m pretty enthusiastic about Phonebloks and Project Ara. I think this is the biggest opportunity in history to, as a community, make a real difference and move forward with a new concept of product design and manufacturing, a concept that is longer term sustainable and enables creativity and innovation.
On my end, I’ll do my very best to bring this project to the upcoming Open Source Hardware Summit – that I’m co-chairing his year – because I’m pretty sure that in the future of the Open Source Hardware movement there should be more cooperation with the manufacturing companies: Consumer Electronics, give the huge impact it has on the environment, is definitely a good industry to start from and should be shortly followed by automotive (thanks to projects like OSVehicle), furniture (look at Slowd or OpenDesk) and many, many more.”