When reading or talking about climate change, pollution, ecosystem destruction, resource use, or any other societal scale issues, there is a pervasive (and possibly engineered) feeling of helplessness that is used to justify inaction. But our helplessness is an illusion. We all affect the flow of history and civilization with our actions, no matter how small they may seem to us – everything we do ripples out into the world.
As the people who build the devices consumed by the world, our actions certainly have a meaningful impact. We have a responsibility to initiate change and move product designs and lifecycle management in a positive direction. It’s up to us – there’s nobody else to do this work on our behalf. This entry is dedicated to collecting material that will help product designers and engineers become more responsible product designers.
You see, the challenges we face will not be solved with one meeting in one night […] Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
– Barack Obama, 5 Feb 2008 Speech
Responsible product design considers the following factors throughout the product development lifecycle:
- Waste Reduction
- Repairability
- Circularity
- Graceful degradation
- Energy efficiency
- Working on what matters, not just creating a product for the purpose of making you rich
Table of Contents:
Industry Problems
Responsible Design Techniques
These are specific techniques that we believe responsible product designers should adopt:
- Support your devices (explores a number of different support strategies)
- Optimize energy use
- Prefer recycled aluminum in your products
- Use more wood in your designs
- Prefer TPE over PVC in your products
- Source power from renewable sources
- Design electronics to be repairable
- Use non-plastic packaging
- Prevent toxic materials from entering the environment
- Address privacy concerns with remote debugging capabilities
Standards
- IEEE GET 1680 Environmental Assessment (need an IEEE account, but not a paid membership, to download)
- Cradle to Cradle
Case Studies
- Blue Clover Devices – a company trying to build products more responsibly
- Sonos’s End-of-Life Strategy – a case study on what not to do when you want to end-of-life a product
- Google Stadia Controller – a case study on making a hardware product useful after the associated software ecosystem is shut down
- Insteon’s Abrupt Shutdown – a case study on what not to do when you shut down your IoT device company
- Automated Systems Require Manual Overrides – a poor design and lack of a long-term support plan left 7,000 lights stuck on in a school without any means of controlling them
- Microsoft Changed Default Settings to Reduce Idle Power Consumption
References
- August 2021: Responsible Design, R2R, E-Waste, NHTSA – Embedded Artistry – the Industry Update email that started this series
- EE Times: Standards as a Circularity Checklist Starting Point
- Better Devices Manifesto: 10 Ways Devices Can Be Ecologically Better by Pete Staples
- Blue Clover Devices agrees with us:
Our business is making devices and we believe that the way we make them makes a difference. Product design is about seeing an unmet need, defining that need as clearly as possible, drawing inspiration from the world around us, and making thousands of design decisions. It’s a big job; too big for any single person; so product design is also about teamwork.
The decisions matter, and we increasingly see how design decisions can have a positive effect on the environment.
- Blue Clover Devices agrees with us: