Product Design: Dave Hakkens changes the face of phones for good

So this is pretty exciting as far as technology news goes. Until a couple of months ago Dave Hakkens was just a graduate of the Design Academy in Eindhoven with a couple of internships and a few really lovely personal projects under his belt – one of them even caused us to write a poem in his honour. But since graduation he’s been beavering away on a project that he (and increasingly everyone else in the world) believes could change the mobile phone game forever.

Dave’s latest project is called Phonebloks, a modular mobile phone concept that makes the idea of throwing away a mobile completely obsolete. To save on consumer waste Dave has proposed a customisable unit into which different screens, applications, hardware and software can be inserted, meaning if things break or require an upgrade you can simply replace the individual component yourself or, if like me you’d like your phone to last a week on only one charge, you can get a bigger battery.

This is all well and good as a concept, but through the medium of crowdsourcing Dave has managed to turn his idea into a reality, drumming up enough support from the online community to arouse the attention of some the world’s major mobile phone companies. Out of all of them he’s chosen to work with Motorola, the original pioneers of mobile phone technology, which means he’s got backing from Google (they own them) giving him the freedom to develop his open-source project over the coming years.

The final product might be a little while coming, but expect updates from this impressive project over the coming months.