Can We Make Electronics Without Factories? The Future of Gadget Design

[phantom power]

I'm not sure I see the part where electronics "aren't made in factories," but the difficulty of disassembly and repair of just about everything has been a pet peeve of mine for years.

Dominic Muren has a great way of looking at greener gadget design -- make it simple, make it repairable, make it upgradable. The longer gadgets last, the less overall environmental impact they have. He gave a great TED Talk on the idea, and we were lucky enough to get him to talk more about the essentials of green gadget design and his hopes for the future of electronics. Read his rapid-fire 5-question interview, and maybe change your mind about how our consumer electronics should be made.

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Currently, we actually spend a tremendous amount of time making electronic devices modular, because these complicated assemblies need re-use of modules (resistors, LEDs, ICs) across many different products, in order to gain economies of scale. These modules conform to common standards, and are more-or-less interchangeable (generally, the simpler the component, the easier it is to substitute).

However, most of the time we spend on designing modularity is based on the assumption that a near term low price is best, even if that results in lower long-term retained value. With the SSG design framework, I'm trying to reverse this.

SSG components are designed not only to allow for mass production of their components (for low price) but also to allow re-use of meta-modules of these components -- a graphics processor blade, or display screen blade, for example. Since customers can bring their blade-modules in to a retailer for re-mixing, rather than re-melting, the value that they paid for originally when they bought the device can be passed along toward the value of the next device.

I guess you could say that Skin-Skeleton-Guts is a design framework for preserving value in products throughout their life cycle.

http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tech-transport/ted-talk-making-gadgets-more-like-guts-skin-and-skeletons.html
http://www.fastcompany.com/1736458/can-we-make-electronics-without-factories-the-future-of-gadget-design