Design Map · Eindhoven
Personal Devices
Graduation project by Saskia Hartog at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
‘Personal Devices’ began with a discarded keyboard rescued from an e-waste bin and asks why functional technologies are so readily abandoned. Rather than treating obsolescence as inevitable, the project explores how consumer culture encourages people to replace devices rather than form lasting relationships with them. Through collecting, repairing, and recombining discarded electronics, the designer transforms obsolete components into a series of playful objects that revive familiar functions — a floppy drive is turned into an mp3 player, and a small action camera and VHS home system become a video recorder. Arranged within an abstract bedroom landscape, the interactive devices invite visitors to type, listen, draw and communicate through awkward, nostalgic and deliberately unconventional interfaces. By slowing interaction and making technology novel and strange again, the project encourages curiosity, affection and conversation about the objects that surround us and the systems that will inevitably deem them obsolete.