When a box called the "Denno Cube" is shot with a Web camera connected to the PC, the PC monitor shows a girl dressed in a maid's costume on top of the box. If the user moves the "Denno Stick," a control wand shaped like a hand, near the girl, she can become happy, or angry. This type of playing with a virtual figure has been released as a shared video service on the Internet and is proving quite popular.
We asked Tanaka why
he became involved in equipment development, and he explained that it
wasn't because he had any skill at it, or because he wanted to launch a
hardware-oriented business. It was merely that he couldn't find the
hardware he needed to implement the service he had in mind.
"Take the user interface (UI), for example. UIs have changed very little in appearance for some time now. They got a little more interesting with the release of the iPhone touch panel, though."
He isn't the only person to notice. In the Internet service and similar industries, it seems that a large number of developers, managers and other people are wishing they could make their own equipment. There are a variety of reasons, but they all share one realization: it is impossible to implement the envisioned service on existing equipment. And in fact, their thoughts probably echo the thoughts of innumerable users.
If you want it, build it. Years ago, the electronics industry thought that way. People wanted radios, audio equipment and other gadgets they couldn't afford, and faced with a lack of information read magazines, collected components, and created their own handmade units.
Making something by hand was not only a method of obtaining a desired piece of equipment: the act itself was entertainment. This process is still continuing today, spreading to encompass a wide range of sectors such as PCs, robots and mobile phone decorations.
People want to make interesting things, and they want to personalize them. The competition in digital household appliances is primarily price these days, and there are not many products that amaze users anymore. The energy that has always driven handmade goods has evolved, and is surging back into the world of electronics again. Today, driven by the power of the Internet, it is back as user-generated devices (UGD).
by Fumitada Takahashi, Phil Keys
User-Generated Devices (UGD), allowing people to enjoy themselves making their own equipment with friends, are making a showing in the electronics industry, fueled by the outsourcing of development and manufacturing, open constituent technologies, and other trends. Only companies capable of discarding the paradigm of volume production will be able to evolve apace with this new dimension in user participation.
The electronics industry has delivered a wide variety of entertainment to consumers: radio, television, audio, mobile phones, games and more. The enormous quantity of equipment shipped from the factories of electronics manufacturers has fascinated users around the globe. Profits from sales provided the capital for new research and development (R&D), creating a host of new technologies. Electronics grew into a gigantic industry by delivering identical products to as many users as possible.
Delivering
finished products to the mass market... today, a new trend quite
different from the past volume-production business, is picking up speed
in the electronics industry, such as in digital appliances. Users are
participating in the development of equipment, services, etc, combining
their ideas with hardware function modules, software and other
components from manufacturers to create digital equipment to their own
personal specifications. The equipment created through this
user-centric development environment is referred to here as
user-generated devices - UGDs (Fig 1).
The development of UGDs is not being driven by the mass market, as in the past. Instead, innumerable "mini-communities" comprised of people who share the same interests as the developer have taken over. And this change will shake the foundations of the volume-production business model.
Since the birth of the electronics industry, there have always been hobbyists who enjoy making their own electronics kits and gadgets. Today, these are restricted to only a few fields, hard-core hobbyists all. The obstacles to designing and assembling handmade equipment are formidable, and as increasingly powerful functions make equipment design more complex than ever, users can access fewer elements of the final product. Worse, the key technologies implementing core product functionality are carefully protected manufacturer secrets. Users can only access a very few constituent technologies.
Over the last few years, though, the walls have been coming down, and there are signs that the world of handmade equipment will begin to push into the mainstream. Based on emerging trends such as hardware modularization and open-source software, along with outsourcing of development and manufacturing, progress toward user-centric development is being made round the world.
July 2010
cover story
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