Gadget design moves out of the box

Move over square-box thinking. Curves are in. You heard right! According to Fast Company’s Kit Eaton, we could soon expect our gadgets – cell phones, mp3 players, and laptops to arrive in much curvier packages.

Why the move to curvy gadgets? What’s wrong with the basic box?

In a recent article, Eaton states that “Boxiness used to make a lot of sense for machines. It was easy to manufacture objects in flat sheet-shapes and fasten them together into a 3D box-shaped object. Machining a boxy shape is easy, can require less material to manufacture, thus making the final item cheaper, or more profitable.”

She also says that there are other business reasons for this square thinking: “It’s cheaper to make circuitry flat and rectangular. Hard drives work better in sturdy, rectangular boxes. Batteries stack up in the shape of a box. And flat, boxy display screens typically function better and resist scratching.  Even the traditional PC is built around box shapes, where you can slide an expansion card into a flat-square laptop – one “box” sliding into a larger box.”

That’s all changing. Eaton states that technical advances are being made with flexible circuits and electronic components. She says that with this new technology, we can manufacture and mount items onto substrates and PEEK film that are resilient and can flex without affecting the function of the circuit. There are even advantages to flex circuits over traditional solid ones: There’s no need for complex wiring when the board itself can be bent to act as a connector.

Companies like Samsung have embraced such out-of-the-box, no-limits development. Just this past November, they introduced a foldable mobile screen. And many are predicting that Samsung will use this unique screen on an upcoming cell phone or mp3 player.

With all of this cool research and development, we’re still just scratching the surface on applications of curved technology, something no doubt our gadgets will evolve to. We soon could be at a point where a person’s gadgets truly reflect his or her unique (and often not-so-square) personalities. Now that’s what I call “thinking outside the box.”