Comments on: The Objectless Office – Dematerialization 3

By: Tim Maly

Tim Maly — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:37:19 +0000

The interesting thing is that those cellphones are essentially gimmicks. I mean, they aren't really great phones. We'd prefer to have great phones that were also sane. We want the sanity baked in. Interestingly, Apple will take back ANY manufacturer's phone. http://www.apple.com/recycling/ipod-cell-phone/

I guess you are pointing out that we're going to throw the stuff we have away anyway, so we should use it to the extent of its natural (engineered) lifecycle and then replace it with something better?

Had a long conversation about this regarding cars, realizing that I don't know enough about them, as far as the relative benefits of getting old cars off the road and replacing them with newer more efficient models, except that there's an environmental cost to building new cars.

By: Tim Maly

Tim Maly — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:33:33 +0000

Here's the thing that's tragic about this. We know mean time to fail, but we don't know or especially care about mean time to decomposition. I mean we sort of do, what with all of the awareness raising about plastic in landfills and whatnot.

So we make these things where the parts are much more durable than the whole.

By: The Real Zajac

The Real Zajac — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:57:18 +0000

Planned Obsolescence started in the marketing department, but it has a closely related but lesser known version in engineering: “Mean Time To Fail”. When designing an item, a small team of engineers will run tests and collect data on how durable it is, both as a whole and as individual parts. Realistically, nothing can last forever, and a complex probability chart is created that documents when it is most likely that a part will stop functioning. This is why your appliances always break right after the warranty ends: the warranty's term of service is calculated with the exactitude of an insurance policy (and usually has one to back it up too).

By: Pamela Shapiro

Pamela Shapiro — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:38:29 +0000

There's no timeline given for the decay, but biodegradable (or at least partially so) cellphones are already kind of here:

marketed, but not all the way there
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/ariel-schwartz/...

researched, not clearly marketed:
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2004/11/30/cellp...

design – but sponsored!:
http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/01/07/grass-phone...

…and while it was mentioned in the article (on the first link, sprint phone) as a negative – I want to emphasize the fact that Sprint is “still churning them [the partially biodegradable phones] out in the same factory as their other phones.”
I want to emphasize it, because I think that makes the point that we don't necessarily need to throw away the *stuff* we're using now. We need to use it differently. We need to put different things through it, or take it apart, or learn how to re-use it. We need to throw away the attitude we're using now, and keep the stuff in whatever form works.