Nov. 2022 Update: The Digital Fair Repair Act presents an opportunity for New York’s legislature to make history and protect users’ rights: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/demand-your-right-repair-new-york-state-0
Some good news! The pendulum of product design philosophy (and the design of the production process itself) is continuing to swing away from disposable objects with built-in obsolescence and is finally gaining momentum back toward products that can be reused, repaired and eventually more fully recycled.
What is Design for Disassembly?
One branch of the Sustainable Design and Industrial Redesign movement is Design for Disassembly (DfD). This design strategy is well summed up here:
Continue reading Repair the cycle: Design for DisassemblyThis is the true genius of design for disassembly. It is a simple commandment to human creativity—you made it, you tell us how to get rid of it when its useful life is over or don’t make it in the first place. Of course, what [makes DfD] so effective is that environmental problems are placed in the hands of those people most likely to have a solution–the product designers themselves.
Jonathan Larson – The Philosophy of Design for Disassembly