There are two competing schools of thought when it comes to technology and design. On the one hand, you have the idea of a unified design, as illustrated by products like modern day smartphones or the unibody MacBook. On the other hand, you have the idea of modular design, only buying the components in order to custom create the solution that best suits your needs. Which approach is the way to go?
Why Modular Design Is Better
Consider the furniture in your home. When you chose to furnish the living room, the bedroom and the office, you chose different pieces of furniture that suited your tastes and your needs. If you wanted another table, you could get another table. If you no longer needed an extra chair, you could get rid of that chair.
This is the essence of a modular design. Any of the individual components can be replaced or removed at any time without necessarily impacting the rest of the components. When you want more, you can add more. Some of the furniture from IKEA works the same way. You can buy the base Expedit shelf or Pax wardrobe frame, customizing the interior with the parts that you need. It’s not pre-built; it’s built to you suit you.
This is one of the reasons why I moved to WordPress many years ago. I could change the theme at will without affecting the content and I could add or remove plug-ins for different functionality.
A typical desktop computer works in much the same way. You can add more RAM when you need it, upgrade the graphics card when you need it, buy a new keyboard or replace the mouse. This is true, though to a lesser extent, with many laptops too, but certain components may not be user-accessible or user-replaceable.
Going further, you may have heard about Motorola’s Project Ara where they want to create a modular smartphone. If you want a fast processor but don’t need a great camera, you can do that. Why pay for extra premium parts when you don’t want them?
Why Unified Design Is Superior
As versatile and adaptable as modular design may be, it is also not without its shortcomings. For starters, a modular design may not “work together” as a unified design. When you have the engineers and designers at a company like Apple or Samsung putting together a comprehensive solution, you can have some assurance that the parts chosen are well suited for one another. When you piece it together yourself, you don’t have that same confidence.
Particularly when it comes to more compact and portable electronics, one of the key advantages to a unified design is a more efficient use of space. When they design everything from their end, they can cram the components as close together as possible. That’s why smartphones are so thin. That’s why the MacBook is so thin. They don’t have to waste any space.
Going back to Motorola’s Project Ara, a modular smartphone would inherently be bulkier than its unified equivalent. You’d have to deal with all sorts of extra connectors, extra casings and extra parts in order to allow the components to function properly and to interact with one another. And it’s probably going to look clunky too.
What’s Your Take?
Back when Ford first revealed its Model T, they told us that we could have it in any color we wanted as long as that color was black. These days, buying a new car means sifting through tons of trim levels, upgrade packages, accessories, and options. The base car is still a unified design, so to speak, but all the add-ons can be quite modular in nature.
Moving forward, what does this mean for the world of smartphones, tablets, notebooks, desktops, cameras, and every other piece of technology that we use on a daily basis? What does this mean for connected homes and smart appliances? Is the sleekness of unified design worth sacrificing the customization possibilities of a modular design?
I really don’t see them as one or the other Michael. I see it more as uni-modular where the products are more unified than anything else and you can add or subtract pieces.
Take a smartphone for example. You can add external speakers if you would like to listen to higher quality music than that of the onboard speakers. An App for a smartphone is a modular part that you can add or subtract.