Environment chapter stub

Below is a stub of a chapter, or section on environmental considerations.

Keeping things out of the land fill.

Companies large and small are feeling the pressure to become “environmental.” This urge manifests itself across a spectrum of involvement. For some companies, they seem only to claim they are making moves, while others are working hard to change their processes from the ground up. The task of reducing use of resources, from energy and oil, to raw materials such as iron ore and wood, is a challenge for even the smallest of objects. But these considerations only pay attention to the life before it gets to the consumer. Most of the life of the material that goes in to that product is going to spend much more of its time buried in the ground.

Think for a moment how long you use a toothbrush. It is recommended that you get a new one every six months. Meaning, for six months, the plastic in that brush will be “in use.” It will be used for the purposes for which it was produced. But how much longer will that object be around? The old tried and true method, the standard, is to throw it away, send it to the landfill. But why does it have to go there? Why does its life have to be done? It must be de rigeur for the designer to think about and examine the use of the product, but also imagine the life of a product. Perhaps more directly, they must think of the lives of the materials from which the product is made. They must have a plan for the making, the molding, the machining, the fastening, the coating, the assembly, the use, the re-use, the disassembly, and perhaps the distribution of the materials once again.

One of the challenges that a new product, or its designer, faces, is the overwhelming number of ways in which we deplete resources in our current production/design cycle. There is so many different modes of transportation, raw materials, production methods, coatings, as well as re use methods, recycling options and disposal questions. Being at the beginning of this exploration, it seems like there is a lot of confusion regarding priorities.

My priorities for this project were:
Keep as much out of the land fill as possible.
During use phase, The object should be able to capture and store its own energy.
i.e. does not need to be plugged in.

Special attention must be afforded to the electronic components. Many of these things are multi-material and manufactured. I want to try to reduce the number of components which fall into this category, but making a light-up bookmark, Energy must be stored and discharged on command.

I am trying to use a number of production methods encourage recycling, and reuse. first, be mindful of the expected use stage for the product. How long do I think this is going to last? Work to make it possible for the user to disassemble and repair on their own. Try to have replacement parts available and cheap for sale. Engage a community of people who see products as a sum of parts. These physical hackers, work to explore the possibilities of objects as a hobby. They generally interface with objects through disassembly and reassembly. Creating objects which appeal to these people will, hopefully, lead to more and more people understanding the ease with which this object can be repaired or reused.

Second, To construct the original object, I want to focus my search for materials on types of materials which are easily recycled, coming from recycled sources, or come from the consumer themselves. This group includes: Steel, copper, other commodity metals, wood, paper, and simple electronic components which could be scavenged from other broken electronic objects.

Robert Blinn, in his thesis, The paradox of weakness : embracing vulnerability in product design, suggests that we work with screws not glue, claiming that we work hard to make things last for ever, when we only use them for a limited amount of time. Applied here, that means we would use folding tabs to hold this together, instead of laminating the thing together. This concept plays even closer to the hole when you realize, its not just easy to disassemble to make it easier to recycle, it also makes it easier mod the thing to alter the desired use. For instance, it should be easy to turn a light-up bookmark into a night light.

This widespread inclusion of the “prosumer” user, is slowly gaining ground. Lego used a small number of these people to develop their latest robotics kit, the Lego Mindstorm NXT. (quote) through a process of combing message boards, devoted to people sharing information, they were able to identify a number of people who seemed, both highly knowledgeable in the existing products, and therefore exceptionally active in these community boards. They are not the only companies to have success in this strategy. Spyderco, an american pocket knife company has a lively forum section to their website, where even the president of the company is a frequent contributor. I myself used this board to “interview users” exploring their thoughts on knife innovation. Through a phone interview with one of spyderco’s engineers, he told me that they take those forums very seriously, using them to identify problems, new materials, consumer wishes, not to mention receiving serious fan mail. Many people spend a lot of time on these forums, and ask nothing in return, they seem to be happy contributing to the success of an object they love. This seems like a simple and strong way to recruit what Guy Kawasaki (quote) calls Evangelists. People who love the product, and are willing to speak out on their behalf, because of their own love.

One more stand out example, is the iMate Roomba. A robotic vacuum cleaner, the story goes, that the engineers used a number of different circuit boards because it was cheaper, not knowing that it would make it easier to hack. (fill in)

These steps, enlisting help, providing a meeting place, and making it accessible can help draw people to your product as well as give them ownership of it. This ownership, creates an emotional bond, ultimately driving the user to want to keep the object around for longer. It is partly up to the designer to help find uses, beyond the original use, which appeal to the user, perhaps convincing them that they have gotten two objects for the price of one.