Consumed Tinkerer's Toy
By ROB WALKER The New York Times June 22, 2008
Chumby
When the Chumby first went on sale a few months ago, the result was not exactly the cultural pile-on occasioned by some gadget debuts, like the iPhone. But Carla Diana knew what it was, and so did many in her peer group. Diana taught industrial design until recently at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and her own work routinely blurs boundaries between art, technology and products; when she lived in San Francisco she was a regular at Dorkbot, a periodic gathering of hackers and tinkerers. When she heard about the Chumby, she recalls, she thought, Oh, I have to get one.
The Chumby is a fairly innocent-looking object resembling a clock radio, with a small touch screen and a leather-covered, padded exterior that feels like a beanbag. It costs $180, and it turns out that "alpha geeks," as Stephen Tomlin, the chief executive and founder of Chumby Industries, puts it, have been the primary target audience so far. What a Chumby does, basically, is display widgets - and your reaction to that shorthand explanation will situate you on the geek continuum. ("What's a widget?" scores pretty low, for instance, but the answer is just two paragraphs away.) What put the Chumby on the radar of people like Carla Diana, however, is what it might be made to do. The Chumby is Internet-connected, runs on Linux software and is extremely hackable. In other words, it is a thoroughly open-source device.
...