It all Starts with Taking Things Apart.

January 18, 2022 5:02 PM

The Last Design You'll Ever Make. "Designers were brought up to design from cradle to grave. Our new challenge is to postpone that grave as long as we can. How can we design the last product our customers will ever need buy? This is how to design for a right to repair."

"We've been designing for disassembly for a while now. Disassembly, not re-assembly.
Designing for disassembly grew from the need to separate parts into different recycling streams and support the recovery of high-value metals. Nobody does design for disassembly better than the Phillips Sonicare toothbrush, whose manual notes "this process is not reversible" before graphically wrapping the toothbrush in a cloth and smashing with a hammer to access the battery.

Designing fracture lines or breakaway regions into products certainly supports the recycling effort, but feels like an admission of failure that the product is destined for a short life. At worst, it will actively frustrate attempts to repair the device."

--
"Four years ago IKEA's Lisabo table introduced a new wedge dowel construction technique. Pitched as a tool-less assembly system, the instructional gif included conspicuous use of a tool to complete the installation of the legs.

Far more interesting was how the lack of glue and increased structural integrity meant it could easily be reassembled many times. "People move a lot more now," noted Jesper Brodin, IKEA's supply manager dryly. "There are more divorces. So if you get kicked out in the morning you can reassemble your table in the afternoon.". Building on this perceived shift from nest building towards transcience, IKEA launched a set of disassembly instructions for Billy, Pax and four other best-selling products. For a company once responsible for 1% of global wood consumption, every Billy taken apart is another Billy that doesn't need to be produced."

--

"Even LEGO, the definition of reusable products, takes design for re-assembly seriously. LEGO Design Manager Jamie Berard's Stressing the Elements presentation contains 35 pages of illegal builds which stress, deform or otherwise risk permanently damaging the bricks. It also contains the memorable line: "Some LEGO projects require an engineer to determine whether an angle is legal.""

posted by storybored (29 comments total)

My electric toothbrush a notch built into the charger that you can use to open up the assembly, exposing the battery and internal mechanism. And if I want to replace that (standard, cheap, widely available) battery, I need to desolder it from the board. Less than a dollar's worth of clips and this would be trivially, tool-lessly easy, but no. It's infuriating.
posted by mhoye at 6:07 PM on January 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think the design that the most people interact with that is truly designed for reassembly is a computer tower, and it's because it was designed for assembly. Towers are often much bigger than they truly need to be, because all that extra room allows for easy access to various components. And if you spend any time taking apart computers you'll quickly appreciate the difference between taking apart a custom case with individually sourced components versus commercial towers made by Dell or HP. Mass-produced PCs are often smooshed tighter into smaller cases that make repairs or upgrades harder than they need to be.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:10 PM on January 18, 2022 [6 favorites]

^ few years ago i did a microATX pc build for the living room thinking i was gonna have this sleek little gaming HTPC and it was very challenging to assemble, having to take it partially apart and re-do it several time until i had figured out the exact sequence that would allow me to get the full-size PSU, full-sized GPU, full-size 5.25" bluray drive, full-size CPU cooler, 230mm fan, 120mm fans, and route all the cables to my satisfaction. in the end i got it all but even now the actual case is not all that much smaller than a standard mid-tower.

the PC occupying my really nice 8 year old full-size Fractal Design case just died so i think i'm gonna rip the HTPC apart and put it all in there where I can actually work on it.
posted by glonous keming at 8:07 PM on January 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

Yes, I love this article. One of my favorite objects that I own is a bedframe that is SUPER easy to assemble AND disassemble AND reassemble etc. etc.
posted by ellerhodes at 8:38 PM on January 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Braungart and McDonough wrote along these lines in Cradle to Cradle

In a talk yonks back at Stanford Michael Braungart discussed making sneakers that could easily be recycled into new shoes but there's been no sign of Nike or anyone taking the hint.
posted by anadem at 8:59 PM on January 18, 2022

An old school telephone is repairable and preternaturally durable because consumers didn't own them, they just rented them and the phone company, (the client,) wanted them designed that way to save on expense. Designers can yammer on about design but in the end the client is the one that calls the shots. If you want repairable etc. the desires of the client will have to be shaped and funneled by law. I was just reading about the Mt. Hood Freeway in Portland and what is clear is that what really kept it from being built was not the influence of the prospective customers of the freeway,( who did not want it,) but the lucky fact that environmental laws were passed that created the tools to stop the thing from being built by the client.
posted by Pembquist at 9:05 PM on January 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

All I know is that I now have 4 expensive consumer electronics items with aging batteries that aren't supposed to be replaced. At least not by mere mortals who don't have special tools, gloves and masks.

So, yeah, this please.
posted by cccorlew at 9:14 PM on January 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Maybe athletic shoes are made differently inEurope, but I have seen many cobbler’s (remember them?) shops in Italy, with resoled or reworked running shoes in the stack of items to be picked up. My mind boggled.
posted by dbmcd at 9:24 PM on January 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Unfortunately, even though I buy a lot of things for quality and repairability, it's progressively getting harder.

I used to take my Birkenstocks to a local (in the US) shoe repair person who would peel off the sole and replace it; he'd also occasionally replace just the straps when that was necessary. A few years ago however, he told me it wasn't worth working on my newish pair as the quality had gone downhill (something I'd noticed without wanting to notice).

My first couple of smartphones were inexpensive models that had removable backs, and I even replaced a couple of screens on them myself. Unfortunately, even that manufacturer seals everything up permanently now.

I'm glad that my aging MacBook could have the bulging battery replaced for a reasonable price, although I'd be even happier if I could've done it myself.

While I'm looking forward to EVs for a lot of reasons, I'm sure all manufacturers are gleefully taking the opportunity to make sure as little as possible will be user-serviceable, which I am not looking forward to.

Guess I don't have a point; just have a mild rant.
posted by Ickster at 9:34 PM on January 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

There's definitely something satisfying about getting more life out of a good pair of shoes by having them repaired. A couple years ago I mailed my black Clarks desert boots to Resole America. They ground away the worn natural rubber soles, and replaced them with new ones made from the same material. They cleaned and polished the leather uppers, too, so that when I got the shoes back, it was like getting a brand-new pair, for half the price.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:54 PM on January 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

Designing for repairability is an almost unmitigated win in the vast majority of cases. I find that it often gets tangled up in discussions about the decrease in expected service life, though. That has good and bad sides.

If you buy a low to mid range home appliance these days, it's almost certainly not going to last half your lifetime like something built before the early 2000s would. However, in most cases the cost of entry is a lot lower in constant dollars than the older stuff. Personally, I think the extra waste and the much worse parts availability outweighs the benefit, but there's at least an argument to be made.

There is no such argument for making things that simply can't be repaired by any reasonable means. It doesn't really cost more, it just requires slightly different design. In the rare case it does cost more, it's literally a few cents per unit. A few tiny torx screws does not materially impact the cost of a cell phone, for example, even if you account for the need for a screwdriver to assemble it. Using a different injection mold on an electric toothbrush so that it clips together costs nothing unless it was designed wrong in the first place. Probably less than nothing when you account for the lack of glue and/or ultrasonic welding.
posted by wierdo at 12:18 AM on January 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

A few tiny torx screws does not materially impact the cost of a cell phone

They do take up space, though, which is at a premium in those tiny devices. Apple famously ditched the headphone jack to reclaim the real estate.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:54 AM on January 19, 2022

If you buy a low to mid range home appliance these days, it's almost certainly not going to last half your lifetime like something built before the early 2000s would

I have really mixed feelings about all this. I have a double oven and cooktop that are ~50 years old, brand new with the house when it was constructed. The oven still works fine, but is way smaller and has no convenience features of a modern oven (ie: no self clean). I have to buy special sized pans and the smallest Thanksgiving turkey or it won't fit inside. It was a also constructed into a cabinet I had to completely remodel my kitchen if I ever wanted to replace it with a larger model. It also holds heat ok at best even though it is small, so I have to buy oven probes and probe food often to see if it is cooking at the correct temperature.

The electric stove is worse and is starting to fail, but probably could be repaired.

The actual mixed feeling I have is that as someone who can repair things, you buy all your appliances and things at basically the same time, and that means they all start to fail at the same time. And repairing things, with the time it takes to research and the extra added expense for something that might not fully fix the problem, and the idea that you fix item #1 and then move on to fixing item #2, and the downtime means that I'm steadily losing my interest in fixing things. That's all just stress.

Maybe if you're rich and can just pay a guy it's not so bad, but my experience with appliance repair people is not great - I generally consider repair warranties a scam. Repairing your car too - that's also a terrible experience even though they generally do know what they are doing, and cars endlessly break.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:57 AM on January 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Apple famously ditched the headphone jack to reclaim the real estate.

And that's why I have to buy another refurbished iPod on eBay every couple of years so I can listen to podcasts in my car.
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:11 AM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Another fairly recent consumer item that struck me as pretty good from a design-to-reassemble standpoint is the Playstation Vita. All the buttons are on daughter boards that can be replaced independently from the expensive mainboard, the analog thumbsticks are attached by ribbon cables (very similar to the Nintendo Switch's thumbsticks) and at the moment replacement parts are so cheap I fixed my deeply scratched front digitizer by replacing the entire front of the unit, including LCD.

Meanwhile I disassembled my PS4, which was a nightmare, and many different varieties of Dualshock 4s, and the Vita was a much more pleasant experience. The PS4 requires you to COMPLETELY DISASSEMBLE THE ENTIRE THING to get to the CPU heat sink that gets clogged with dust and hair, and the DS4s have their analog sticks soldered to a hard to replace board, and dealing with that useless touch pad/button and the shoulder triggers is a pain in the ass every time.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:50 AM on January 19, 2022

The poster child for this is the Framework laptop, a computer so designed for repair that the components have qr codes on that direct the user to part numbers and replacement guides. The entire thing respects the user to an impressive extent, and the motherboard is designed to be upgradable so you can get new processors as desired. It's glorious.
posted by jaduncan at 11:59 AM on January 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

While I'm looking forward to EVs for a lot of reasons, I'm sure all manufacturers are gleefully taking the opportunity to make sure as little as possible will be user-serviceable, which I am not looking forward to.

Even our local mechanic next door doesn't work on EVs, because of the high voltages present and the currents involved. Our EV still has a conventional 12V battery for powering the lights, radio, wipers and such, and he'd probably fix those bits if asked (but over the past 2.5 years we haven't even needed to), suspension, tyres and brakes too because they're by and large identical to the parts used on the ICE version, but otherwise, no. And apart from those conventional bits and bobs there's very little to work on anyway: it doesn't have a clutch and gearbox, it doesn't need oil changes every [time or distance interval], it doesn't have an exhaust that corrodes and gets eaten away. It simply doesn't have a lot of the 'consumables' that conventional engines need.

And making cars hard to service by the average owner is not limited to EVs; it's a trend that's started at least two decades ago. Change a headlight bulb? Jack up the car and remove the front wheel.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:21 PM on January 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

This is important on so many levels, and changing the current paradigm of waste is the main challenge of our age, from my construction sector point of view. To me, it is a good and necessary and fun challenge, but I can also see how most of my colleagues struggle with it. Not least because it isn't just the products that are designed for waste, but also the whole proces. To plan a building made for reuse, you need to be able to tweak the system on all levels, and even the most dedicated practitioners find that incredibly hard.

I'm old. When I was in college, I repaired my electronics just because I liked to. I knew how to repair my car, but there was a very nice retired mechanic who did it for me for free, I think he liked the idea of a girl who knew car parts. I knew how to build a house, and literally all of the parts that went into it, because there weren't that many. I still have my first expensive coat. I've had it changed once and repaired once, and a decade ago, I decided to pass it on to recycling, but somehow I couldn't and after reading this post, I'm going to pay for getting a new lining for it, so it gets another 30 years of life. Already now, it is more than worth the then high price (about 200 dollars in 1986, I think).

When I look at my students today, I don't think a single one of them could do (or know who to pay to do) any of these things regardless of gender or if they have a trade education in advance (as quite a few of them do). It's not their fault at all. Everyone in this thread knows why, but changing the course is a huge undertaking, and I think governmental initiatives and money need to set the direction.
posted by mumimor at 12:22 PM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I used to work in the repair division of a large PC manufacturer, one of those brands with a very short name. We had multiple teams devoted to design-for-repair which were dedicated to the task of making our machines easy for customers to repair, easy for trained on-site techs to repair, and easy for bunny-suited cleanroom workers to repair. We would struggle mightily to find ways to reduce the number of disassembly screws, and participated in hundreds of prototype teardowns to reduce or eliminate any possibility that a repair operation could damage a unit.

Here's the important thing: design-for-repair at my old PC company was not a priority. Cost, timelines, and industrial design parameters outweighed repairability every time a conflict arose. Aside from the design-for-repair teams themselves, almost nobody cared. I was only interested because their work gave me a glimpse into the future of what my major problems would be once the products launched. While valuable enough to devote the efforts of a 50-person team, repairability was an afterthought in the overall design of the company's machines.

I still dream of working for a company like Framework or Fairphone, which appear not to operate under those same guiding principles.
posted by Enkidude at 12:43 PM on January 19, 2022 [5 favorites]

There's an easy way to know if a prebuilt PC or a laptop is repairable or not: Look for a hardware maintenance manual. If it doesn't exist at all, you can be certain it isn't easily repairable.
posted by wierdo at 2:01 PM on January 19, 2022

They do take up space, though, which is at a premium in those tiny devices. Apple famously ditched the headphone jack to reclaim the real estate.

And somehow the newer models have only grown in size. The headphone jack going missing is more about getting an IP rating than size. If you really just want to save space, you can use a 2.5mm jack. Still annoying, but at least the adapter is only a couple of dollars. In either case you still need an amplifier, but again, phones are growing, not shrinking.
posted by wierdo at 2:08 PM on January 19, 2022

I think that things which have been used broken and repaired are beautiful. It can be a very design-y kind of beauty See also brand new relic guitars and pre-stressed jeans, but a good repair can give a mass produced object a history, and it can provide a sense of ownership and identification.

Minimalism, as a philosophy of stuff, seems to me to suggest disposable, at least as far as a lot of its proponents are like "I got rid of all my stuff!" even as they keep a few really useful things. Maybe there's a competing "Behold! My Stuff!" philosophy where you have a bunch of things that you lovingly repair and maintain indefinitely, and those things contribute to your identity.
posted by surlyben at 5:51 PM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Talking of PCs, I wanted to install an SSD to boost performance. But I ended up not doing it because there was a likely chance I'd mess things up. The PC is a HP model with an incredibly cramped case, there are internet posts that don't give me much confidence that I'll be able to do it easily and so on. It's too bad because I can picture it giving me another two or three years of useful life if it had an SSD.
posted by storybored at 9:24 PM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Eh, I've never been shy about stuffing drives literally anywhere they'll fit in a case. I felt like I was taking a bit of a chance leaving spinning disks unsecured, like when I put my third 1GB disk on top of the power supply in the cramped desktop case I was using at the time in the mid 90s. When I had tower cases that got full, I found the top of the CD-ROM drive was another good place to stash an extra disk. You definitely can't move them like that, however.

SSDs are pretty damn robust, though. I wouldn't be moving the case around too much with a totally unsecured drive, but not because I'd be worried about the SSD. They're light enough the cables will mostly hold them in place and even if they were to fall, they are unlikely to be damaged, but there is enough of a risk that it could get loose and knock something off the motherboard I'd still remove it or secure it before turning the computer on its side or putting it in a car.
posted by wierdo at 10:18 PM on January 19, 2022

Minimalism, as a philosophy of stuff, seems to me to suggest disposable, at least as far as a lot of its proponents are like "I got rid of all my stuff!" even as they keep a few really useful things.

The (few) accounts I've read of people going that route all had me concluding that they were externalising a *lot* of the stuff that would otherwise require them to keep items around. Such as not having (as an extreme example) cooking utensils and a stovetop, which would mean going out for your evening meal. Sure, a restaurant or takeaway serves many customers and uses their equipment much more efficiently that way. But they are not going to mend things to keep them going longer; it's not worth the time it'd take. So you, as that minimalist, have no control anymore over that part of your environmental footprint, where that appears to be one of the motivations for people to want to declutter.
posted by Stoneshop at 1:22 AM on January 20, 2022

Strictly speaking, this is not repair... but many, many smartphones are considered obsolete once the software reaches a certain age (or there simply is a newer model on the market), so in a way, it is: just a few hours ago I flashed (installed, but calling it flashing is so much more hip) a Oneplus 5t with LineageOS 18.1 with MicroG. This brings it up to par with Android 11, but it's pretty much completely divorced from Google. I happen to see that as a good thing.

This one is for my mom, who decided that Ubuntu Touch (which I use and love) was too different from the aging Android she was used to... and I feel that when you are 83, you get to make that choice. So I installed something that is familiar, and gives this phone from 2017 a new lease on life. Android versions for this model stop at 10.

It's insane that something as polluting to make as a smartphone is intended to be used for just a year or three. Of course, once the battery starts to fail, there's not a whole lot that can be done, as removable batteries are not the norm anymore these days (and I see that as a bad thing). But as long as it's just the software, there are options.
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:29 AM on January 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yeah, removable batteries. On the plus side, a buddy of mine recently revived her iphone with a battery transplant at the Apple Store. On the negative side, this option is not heavily publicized, so even when available, many people are unaware.

I have an old Google Nexus 7 that could probably use a new battery to give it a second life as an e-reader. Where do I get one and how to install it? It would be nice if that was front and center on a support page somewhere.
posted by storybored at 7:05 AM on January 20, 2022

It would! But it's always worth checking IFixIt.
posted by Too-Ticky at 7:39 AM on January 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Great advice Too-Ticky! Thanks. It seems do-able. I'll make it a rainy-day project. So funny that the upgrade is marked as "Moderate Difficulty".
posted by storybored at 7:54 AM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]