Impact of open source harware

What happened in the web/software industry is now happening with hardware: the distance between an idea and its materialization has shortened, and objects can now be created anywhere on the planet, more easily and cheaply than ever .

Slowly but surely, the capability to create objects is going down to the general public. Arduino is the poster child of the revolution, an open source board than almost anyone can use at his advantage to create simple applications in a matter of minutes (read this Wired article for more information).

Buy a board, connect it to your computer, upload one of the code samples in it and here comes the magic of having created an object. Read a few manuals, harass a friend who studied electronics, and you might be able to rebuild a TV B gone, or create a low cost heart rate monitor.

^{Tom Boonsiri’s low-cost heart rate monitor, or when a person can create a cheap, easy to replicate, openly documented and useful object.}

This is an important evolution, it will impact us in many ways. Innovation will come from everywhere, the price to create and commercialize an object will go down. We will see some shops who create any idea you have, a place where you go and say you want a sky of Leds for the kid’s bedroom and they build it for you. Electronic artisans, a cool new job for all the hackers out there.

Successful designs will end up being copied, cloned, documented so that everyone can rebuild them at home. Fascinating legal questions will emerge (are you allowed to rebuild an iPod at home? can you sell it to a friend), the lawyers will make a lot of money until someone realizes that the only way to protect a product is not to sue the world, but to make it evolve constantly.

Ecological responsibility will be in the hands of thousands of people, not only in those of a few engineers at a global corporation. Emerging countries will have an easier access to expensive objects, probably impacting the designs of the developed world as they tweak existing objects with even more imagination than us.

A big change, around which our next conference in Marseille is built, and that will change forever our relation to objects as they become more fluid, and much less mysterious.