Big Think | Design for Good: Ayah Bdeir had a dream - take electronics out of the hands of experts and large companies and put them in the hands of ordinary people in order to make them inventors, builders, designers, and experimenters. Today, her dream is a reality. Her company, New York based littleBits Electronics, makes electronics accessible to kids, adults, geeks, and amateurs, and has been gaining increasing popularity, critical acclaim, and investors attention.
12 comments:
This is one of the coolest things that I have seen posted to this page. As someone who loves do it yourself products like lego this product seems super cool. Even though I consider myself somewhat of an electronics wiz this is still a product that will certainly make it on my christmas list. My favorite aspect of this product is that there is no programming required. I have an Arduino which can do some awesome things but I have trouble with the Java programming required to make it do what I want it to do. I think that with the LittleBits sets people with the knowledge that I have about electronics but the lack of programming knowledge will be able to make some seriously cool things. With the companies that this company has paired with, including Korg and NASA, I think that the possibilities are truly endless with the LittleBits kits.
I hope this becomes huge. Aside from Lego Mindstorm which had some pretty significant limitations when I was little there was nothing but breadboards. Getting into making your own stuff with breadboards is not extremely difficult but it also is not exactly fun at the beginning. This could be an amazing educational tool on a huge scale. As a kid I could've sat down for hours just clicking different pieces together to see what they do.
So then I went online to check their prices, and damn do I hope those drop significantly and quickly. For a few hundred dollars you can get 10-20 pieces. And until you spend around $1000 it doesn't look like you are going to get enough to do any real prototyping. Still a great purchase for a school though, especially for younger kids.
Wow! This would will awesome! I totally agree with Mike & Isaac, this needs to become huge. This can allow so many people, especially kids to get a feel for creating, making, and inventing things they imagine. Kids can come up with so many innovative things, but don't always have a way to express them or make them real. Additionally, people who want to try this out but don't have the time to truly learn, or know if they should invest time learning, can experiment and figure it out.
This is such a cool idea. In the same way that current technology allows people without a strong natural inclination towards drawing or painting to communicate with visual art, littleBits could allow an entirely knew set of people to communicate ideas they otherwise would not have the technical abilities to express. As someone without a strong inclination towards electronics, I would say that the company is doing a great job marketing littleBits in such a way that it appeals to people like me. Aside from the video making the product easy to understand, it also makes it look useful and fun. I found the cloudBit video equally compelling, the way it demonstrated the uses of the product was really well done. I would love to see this product make it to the mainstream.
To be entirely honest, I don't see this becoming a hugely successful product, nor do I think the effect of it will be incredibly lasting. While the possibilities here are incredible and worth every dollar spent on one of these kits to people like me who like to work with things such as legos, and would love to have this, the general population these days wants things to be handed to them ready to go. This is why everyone loves products that Apple produces. You don't have to tinker with it to get it to function like you want it to, it comes ready to go and you can hardly even change it...and everyone eats it up. This is why even though PCs work just fine and Samsung Galaxy S5 phones are an incredible device, they'll never win over the iPhone or a Macbook because they take work. It's a disheartening realization, but I truly don't believe that this is a step that kids or even adults in this era of technology will embrace. Why would you buy a product to learn about something that is so readily available for probably about the same price and requires no work. I am in no way saying that I condone what I am saying, but I definitely believe this is a realistic way to talk about a product like this.
This is pretty sweet. The learning curve and barrier to entry for a lot of "tinkerer's electronics" is pretty high. Arduino products comes to mind. I suppose Lego Mindstorm is a simpler set of intro electronics, but I feel that the possibilities that can be opened with littleBits are so much greater. The fact that littleBits is "infinitely open-source" and that there is an app store for hardware prototypes is also super cool. Any cool piece of hardware that is popular enough will be manufactured, which is pretty darn awesome. I really hope that this becomes much more popular and accessible. All that needs to happen is that the price really needs to come down.
I don't know. It looks like a box of toy to me. Any by toy I related to toy-something not really functional but good for imaginary practice. Ok, I think it's cool, it's interesting, it looks fancy, But I am an old woman who lives my life in Purnell still finding time to sleep, and pretty much I'm sure it will be the same for the rest of my life (accept I married to a super rich man and don't have to work, which sounds impossible), plus I know myself that it's gonna take a while for me to learn and understand if I really want to make whatever I aim to make really functions, I don't have time and I have no interest in this thing, I just don't . I love something quick and easy and still functional, even better if I have someone do it for me.
However,I might buy it for my kids to play with and it will be really useful for him.
I think this is by far one of the best ideas that I've seen recently. In this day and age technology is progressing so fast and interfacing makes everything so seamless that the average American uses remarkable technology everyday with little to no understanding of the tons of little components involved. While many people have great ideas that can could have great potential as start ups or revolutions in an industry the disconnect between the final product and the hardware needed to make it discourages many. I love this product as it helps bridge the gap between the common man and the skilled engineer. As someone who has always loved tinkering with things, I think this is a great product to help creative people make their designs a reality without having to be fluent with a variety of technical skills.
This is really cool. It's like the next step forward from arduino, allowing people who have absolutely no idea about programming or circuitry to be able to create their own technology. I wonder how this stands up when compared to the lego kits that allow people to build and programs robots. I haven't ever used one, but I imagine they require more programming. I wonder how they have the modules snapped together with magnets without interference with the electronics.
This honestly is the coolest thing I have seen in a long time. Like it brings me back to middle school when I was given this complicated kit that Had I sat down and read the 50 page book I could learn how to wire this circuit board to make a plethora of different sounds and small functions like make a like glow or make a small powered fan. It was fairly complicated and the book was a dry read so combined with my short attention span I was only able to be motivated enough to make one bird sound play. The fact that their is a easy to understand color coding system and youtube instructional videos are a bigger thing now helps to make this so much more. It baffles me to come to the realization that the generation that is growing up now will be so much smarter than I was at their age because they have access to so much more knowledge and we know that they can handle it.
Growing I was told that the fact that I grew up learning how to use a computer to the point that it is second nature to me should how much more I knew than people who's job of writing things in long hand and then using a typewriter where long over and now were struggling to adapt to the computer. The fact that people now have access to educational websites like code academy and khan academy and now little bit, shows how much of a technically savy society we are and in theory we are creating a society where people are intelligent enough to create a self sufficient world and under how the world works so much so that no one is blindly accepting anything anymore.
This is so cool! I really hope that this becomes big. As the article says, so many cool things are happening with software and programming, and the hardware lags behind. The incredible Lego creations made by children and adults alike could be echoed in the creations made with these electronic pieces. I love that these things are so easy to put together, and that there is no programming required to create something cool. That they can be used for more than entertainment is also a big piece of the coolness factor; they can be used to in the classroom setting to teach about the physics of circuitry and electricity, in a new, interesting, and more interactive way. I can't wait to see what happens with these!
LittleBits reminds me of Legos or Lincoln Logs company but for electronics. It's cool that people can jet play and make simple things in order to learn but more advanced users can also make more advanced things. I wonder if this product is also user friendly for age 6+ kids too though. How Legos and Lincoln logs help kids understand structure LittleBits has some room to help kids growing up in the world of technology understand how it all works early on. I can see how this will become popular for home users and in education. It's great that there is an up and coming product that can help the general public better understand how our electronics works! I'm excited to see more of them.
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