Analog In, Digital Out: Brendan Dawes on Interaction Design

5. Recycling the Past

These days we live in a world where we’re constantly being told to upgrade and update. It’s the nature of a consumption-based culture that we habitually throw things away rather than find new ways to use them. So we end up being surrounded by lots of dead things. Bits of hardware that we’ll never use again gather dust on our shelves like discarded toys in a child’s nursery—sad, lonely, unloved, and unusable. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Something that we once loved can actually be brought back to life and mutated into a different useful, fun object with a full future ahead.

Amongst all the bits of “presumed dead” ...