After Google – via Motorola – entered a partnership with Phonebloks, a concept to build modular and therefore repairable and extendable mobile phones – 3DSystems enters the picture. The project now goes under the name of “Ara”. Highly individualized, modular, 3D printed phones on an industrial scale, that is the promise. The result should do both – make phone production, or at least a larger part of it – more sustainable and take the “with my phone I can do anything” paradigm beyond the app into the hardware realm.

What are the implications for media? We do not know yet, but individualization has been a topic for many years.

We imagine that in just a few years newspapers are not developing apps but little building blocks for the phone. What will the newspaper building block look like? Making the endless stream of pictures, articles, videos more sustainable in this context could mean to find ways to deliver it when the likelihood of it being used is highest. The archive is the most archaic form of sustainability of news. What will, in that respect, the phone do that the internet can not?