Semi-serious post: when I saw this announcement for a bamboo bio-degradable phone, shortlisted at this year’s 2008 Greener Gadgets Design Competition (!)

this other image immediately came to my mind:

this is robot Bender in Futurama, an episode entitled “Obsoletely Fabulous”, in which he decided to downgrade to wood as a protest against new robots on the market. Eventually he ends up on fire.
While this is still fiction, the bamboo bike is a reality: conceived by the Earth Institute engineers of Columbia University and tested in Ghana and Kenya, Bamboo-Bike can be assembled in less than a day from natural materials. check it out www.bamboobike.org

Are material objects going to become as volatile as digital support and as rapidly aging as software? Technologies are already pushing forward one new model after the other, mostly for profit reasons. Still, just 30 years ago a sign of status would have been, for instance, a designer’s lamp to keep in the living room, and the main value for many objects was their durability. Now flexibility and replaceability (and the last trend, sustainability) are the most advertised qualities. How is all this reflecting to culture, is remediation enough to keep up with the times, or is this really the end of history as we know it? (Too bad Horkheimer and Adorno said it already in the 60ies).

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