By now, you’ve no doubt heard of casemodding — the geek craze for stuffing the guts of a computer into an interesting, weird, or useful case. My latest column for Slate uses casemodding as a jumping-off point to argue that what’s happening is the rise of “grassroots industrial design”: Cheap electronics components making it possible for people to design their own digital-age tools. As I argue:

When was the last time you trimmed goose quills to make a pen? The genius idea of industrialism was the concept of the Model T: In exchange for something cheap and well-made, we’d forgo unique, lovely design.

But the Model T is old news. Nowadays, people want consumer goods to have serious aesthetic appeal. If they can’t find what they want in stores, they’ll build it themselves. You could call it “grass-roots industrial design.”

You can read the rest of it for free — and if you have any thoughts, post ‘em in Slate’s discussion area The Fray! That casemod above, by the way, is the lead example in my piece: The gorgeous “Osh-Kosh”, a computer stuffed into an old-school vanity case for use as a portable DJing device, created by Dustin Smith.