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The company produces modular 3D-printed hardware starting from the components of broken devices.
When a device is broken, we throw it away. Take a smartphone: imagine it gets too slow, or the screen doesn’t switch on anymore. In the best case, it will end up in a collection centre, in the worst case in a dustbin, or maybe simply in a drawer, together with old cables and other items of technological modern antiquities. The problem is that maybe some of the components of that smartphone were still perfectly functional, like the camera, the speakers, the microphone, or the processor. What to do then?
If these components were easily accessible, they could be repurposed for new devices. This is the philosophy of Nascent Objects, a hardware ecosystem based on a social platform that allows users to print in 3D modular devices, designed to be easily disassembled and upgraded.
Nascent Objects devices are made up of two parts: Nascent Shapes provides the form, while Nascent Modules provides all the functions. The company sustains that using these modules for different applications is as easy as changing the batteries of a TV remote.
Their best known product is Droppler, a device that keeps track of the domestic use of water and can be assembled with components of Wi-Fi speakers and old cameras. Other products are to be released soon, such as drones, baby monitors and garden sensors. The idea of Nascent Objects is just one of the many proposals in the field of modular devices. In 2013 the first modular smartphones were produced, with the partial support of Google: so far, however, nobody had designed a structure that allows to exchange the components of different product types. This move could encourage a greater reuse of electronic components, reducing the use of energy and materials and allowing consumes to save up.
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