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Posted by Monty Solomon on June 30, 2008, 8:31 pm
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Consumed
Tinkerer's Toy
By ROB WALKER
The New York Times
June 22, 2008
Chumby
When the Chumby first went on sale a few months ago, the result was
not exactly the cultural pile-on occasioned by some gadget debuts,
like the iPhone. But Carla Diana knew what it was, and so did many in
her peer group. Diana taught industrial design until recently at the
Georgia Institute of Technology, and her own work routinely blurs
boundaries between art, technology and products; when she lived in
San Francisco she was a regular at Dorkbot, a periodic gathering of
hackers and tinkerers. When she heard about the Chumby, she recalls,
she thought, Oh, I have to get one.
The Chumby is a fairly innocent-looking object resembling a clock
radio, with a small touch screen and a leather-covered, padded
exterior that feels like a beanbag. It costs $180, and it turns out
that "alpha geeks," as Stephen Tomlin, the chief executive and
founder of Chumby Industries, puts it, have been the primary target
audience so far. What a Chumby does, basically, is display widgets -
and your reaction to that shorthand explanation will situate you on
the geek continuum. ("What's a widget?" scores pretty low, for
instance, but the answer is just two paragraphs away.) What put the
Chumby on the radar of people like Carla Diana, however, is what it
might be made to do. The Chumby is Internet-connected, runs on Linux
software and is extremely hackable. In other words, it is a
thoroughly open-source device.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22wwln-consumed-t.html
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