This Product Will Self Destruct in 5 Seconds
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This Product Will Self Destruct in 5 Seconds: A Celebration of Trash Richard Fry, IDSA, Assistant Professor Industrial Design Program School of Technology Brigham Young University Abstract Don’t save it! Throw it away. We live in the culture of experience. The artifact is dead. Recycling is now a thing of the past. Our problem is not in trying to design things to be recycled, but instead to make them so temporary as to be completely disposable. This product will self-destruct when you are through with it! What happens when we embrace the culture of disposable diapers? Cell phones have gone from being a precious item of status to a disposable commodity purchase at the counter of your local 7-11. Why not everything else? It is no longer “He who dies with the most toys wins” it’s about gathering experiences and access. This paper looks at the concept of embracing “disposability” and its consequences. What happens to industrial design when we reduce a product to the point where truly the “artifact is dead”. Long live experience. Richard Fry entered the education field 2 years ago when he began teaching Product Design in the Industrial Design at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT. He completed his Masters of Fine Arts in Industrial Design at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Previous to entering the education field, Richard worked in the areas of Aerospace, Exhibit, Appliance, and Home Fitness design. He currently goes by the title “Richard Fry – Design Guy.” This Product Will Self Destruct in 5 Seconds: A Celebration of Trash Richard Fry, IDSA, Assistant Professor Industrial Design Program School of Technology Brigham Young University Introduction: Ever since I became a father, the debate of the killer disposable diapers has always gnawed at the back of my brain. While the debate about their place in society still rages on, and no one can make up their minds about which method of waste management is best (Lee, 1997), other examples of disposability on a mass scale have crept into our lives. Disposable razors, the classic Zippo lighter replaced by its disposable sibling. Disposable cell phones, and phones themselves evolving into “pre-paid minute” phone cards. Motorola will soon introduce a version of their “talk-about” radios for $19.99 a pair. The original “talk-about” product sold for approximately $89.99 each. This new product was designed to be “near disposable” from the get go. Thinner plastic, paper-thin circuit boards, etc. It’s not quite disposable, but pretty close. The purpose of this short paper is to examine some of the ideas surrounding disposability. I hope to present the idea that everything disposable is not always bad. Clarity is not guaranteed, but I hope to spark further questions. A Simplified Economic Model Economics can be defined as “The allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses” (Sowell, 2000). What is a resource? We tend to think of resources as being physical. Things like steel, cloth, plastic, and grain come to mind. But some resources are less tangible. Labor and Intellect, for example, are less tangible than physical resources, or Capital. Every economy, in every country, seems to be going through a similar cycle on the way to economic prosperity. That cycle consists of 3 stages (subsistence, industrial, and finally informational). In each of these phases, there is a relationship (economically speaking) between the resources of Capital and Labor. The first phase is a subsistence economy. This is pre Industrial Revolution. The goal is to provide basic needs. This is Maslow’s “Existence” level. The primary concerns are safety and physiological comfort. During this phase, Labor is plentiful and Capital is scarce. Both are worked to their fullest advantage. In relation to physical products, when you have lots of time, labor, or both available it makes sense to repair and replace. Capital is the expensive part of the equation. It needs to be shared, conserved, and re-used. The second phase is the Industrial Economy. During the Industrial Economy, technology emerges that takes us into the area Maslow calls Autonomy. Here, through the creation of goods, we become concerned with “Self Esteem” and the need to be accepted by others. Here, the availability of Capitol begins to equal the resource of Labor. The third phase is the Information (or Idea) Economy. This is the economy that works in the “Experience” mentality. This is the economy that declares, “The artifact is dead.” The product is not important. The Experience dominates. In an Information economy, the ability to generate Capital is greater than the availability of Labor. Labor becomes the scarce resource. Time becomes more valuable than Capital. It becomes easier to replace than to repair. Buy a new one rather than fix the old one. Labor is expensive, Capital is available in large quantities. Faults in Transition Fundamental to my hypothesis is the thought that we really haven’t made the mental transition from one economy to the next. Mentally, we are back in the subsistence mode. What happens when someone from a Labor Rich, Capital poor economy (with all its developed behaviors) is asked to survive in a Capital Rich/Labor Poor world? Here are some examples that you have probably had experience with. Feel free to add some examples from your own experiences. Examples: 1. A depression era adult deciding whether to upgrade the old furnace or buy a new one is a good example. The old furnace still works (but with an efficiency rating of around 24%). To overhaul the old furnace would cost approximately $1800.00 (with a new efficiency rating of about 30%). A new furnace would cost approximately $3000.00 (with an efficiency rating of 94%). However, the old furnace is not broken and it was built to last. Therefore, it is still good. It shouldn’t be thrown away. 2. Saving tin cans with nails in them. Compare the cost of the time to straighten the nails, sort them, and store them for future use to just going to the hardware store and buying exactly what is right for the job. So, a definition of “waste” is really dependent on what economic situation you exist in - Labor rich/Capital poor OR Capital rich/Labor poor. In the former, it would be bad to waste Capital (let’s think equipment, aluminum and other scrap metal, paper). In the latter, where Labor is actually the scarce resource, it doesn’t make sense to waste TIME and EFFORT. Definition of Disposability Let’s now return to the topic at hand – disposability. We usually think of something disposable as something very cheap and flimsy. Instead, let me propose the following definition: A disposable product can be defined as a product that costs more to repair than to replace. In an economic situation where Labor is scarcer than Capital, if something becomes difficult, awkward, or expensive to repair, then I am going to throw it away. That being said, lets broaden the lexicon of disposable items to include larger, less considered products. What other things now fit our model that we didn’t think of before? How about cellular telephones that get thrown away when providers change or contracts expire? How about that watch that only cost $6.95 that was worn for 2 years and then thrown away when it was found that a replacement band would cost $16.99? How many of you have found it to be more cost effective, when your VCR failed, to be more cost effective to buy a new one at $49.99 that to have it repaired at $60.00 or more? The Disposability Continuum The ballpoint pen is so disposable that we don’t even think about it any more. But not all pens are alike. Ballpoint pens run the gamut from completely disposable to completely refillable. The “Bic” brand disposable pen can cost as little as $.09 and can write for more than a mile. A Parker pen that I got at my High School graduation has an insert that is replaceable, but the main structure of the pen remains. A “Mont blanc” fountain pen sells for $200.00 or more and allows you to suck raw ink right up into a chamber - losing nothing. Using the pen as a coding scheme, three categories can be created: 1. Completely disposable. 2. Restorable (replacement modules). 3. Refillable: This category seems to be dwindling. Fountain pens are a dying breed. Disposable technical pens replaced even the old standby refillable Koh-I-Nor technical pens. I include it here for completeness. A Familiar Example: Single Use Cameras For many years, cameras have been split into the “professional” vs. “hobby” cameras. The expensive models had interchangeable lenses, different body types, different film sizes and qualities. Hobby cameras had a single lens, and replaceable film “cartridges”. In an attempt to capture that low-end market, all sorts of new technologies crept up. Pocket cameras evolved. Point and shoot cameras, disk cameras. Around relatively the same time, both Fuji and Kodak introduced a new type of camera – the “experience” camera (Kodak, 2002). This category gave users the ability to not even own a camera. All they had to do was buy the film (in an enhanced package) and be able to record their life. These new “Single-Use” cameras were not an overnight success. People perceived them as “disposable”. Our aversion to wasting Capital left over from a previous economic model prevented immediate adoption. But now, these “disposable” cameras account for a large share of the space in the “impulse buy” area around the registers at Wal-mart.