How Industrial Design Became a Weekend Hobby

Dustin Smith loved DJing at his friends' parties, but his MP3-filled computer just wasn't rugged or portable enough to haul across town. When Smith found a vintage OshKosh makeup case, a light went off. After buying a bunch of electronics components and making a zillion trips to the hardware store, he was done: Smith had crammed an entire computer inside the retro case. "There's a real design aesthetic to it," he says, "but I also wanted something really functional."

When I first saw Smith's tricked-out machine, I immediately wanted one to call my own. The makeup-case computer is an example of a "casemod," a modification of an interesting shell—a coffee maker, a typewriter, a chrome box—so that a computer fits inside. It used to be that people didn't design their own everyday stuff—partic ularly not work-related tools like computers. When was the last time you trimmed goose quills to make a pen? The genius idea of industrialism was the concept of the Model T: In exchange for something cheap and well-made, we'd forgo unique, lovely design.

But the Model T is old news. Nowadays, people want consumer goods to have serious aesthetic appeal. If they can't find what they want in stores, they'll build it themselves. You could call it "grass-roots industrial design."

more: slate.msn.com/id/2105436/ (72)

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