Industrial Design Student Work: "How Long Should Objects Last?"

Also, the whole work seems to skip over the huge problem of insufficient customer information: There is a remark in there, that lots of people (about half) seem to choose the ultra-durable umbrella, rather than one of the less resource-intensive ones. The reason for this imho isn't that people don't care about the resources. It is rather that everyone has been conditioned to assume that products are crappier than specified. People do not and usually can not know how durable each product they are offered will be. And buying something ultra-durable-seeming at least gives you a chance at a decent product lifetime. All the rest is usually crappier than expected.

One reason is that the environmentally friendlier alternatives are often also materials of lesser quality. E.g. recycled plastic degrades and is more brittle than "fresh".

The other reason is greedy manufacturers, saving on necessary materials, making products less durable. And maybe intentionally building in weak points, limiting lifetime to sell more stuff.

Original: https://2021.rca.ac.uk/students/charlie-humble-thomas/

As long as you don’t consider anything else, like the fact you have to employ Y times the person-hours to make the crummy ones, and Y times the freight to deliver them, and Y times the customer getting pissed off that their cheap umbrella broke and they have to take time out of their day to acquire a replacement.

I swore off buying junky stuff a long time ago. Life’s too short to be surrounded by crap that’s going to break the first time you look at it wrong, student projects be damned.

(That doesn’t mean I only buy luxury items. Far from it! You can get Levi’s Premium line jeans that last X longer than the discount store ones for far less than X times the price. I’ve worn the same pair of leather boots for 6 years now. I’ve had my Birkenstocks resoled several times now instead of throwing them out while the rest of the sandal’s in great shape. It’s usually pretty easy to find the quality version of a given thing for not much more than the junky one.)

There is a temple in Japan that exists for hundreds of years. It’s the same temple only in a “Ship of Theseus” sense, as it gets rebuilt every 20 years by experts. But in a sense, it’s the same temple.

Or take another example: dressing shoe. A shoemaker can reform your father’s and grandfather’s shoe back to brand new if you so desire. The materials are easily sourced, all it takes is trained labor.

Why can’t we have this for everything?

Modern economic practice has optimized for cutting back intensive labour dependency in favor of simpler disposable goods. It’s a “win” from multiple angles: less durable goods means more sales, costs of materials and residue are externalized anyway so that makes up your margin, and you don’t have to deal with expert workers demanding better pay. It’s beautifully optimized - just not optimized for what matters.

If you think about it, bottled water is the ultimate bullshit product. We put a freely occurring natural element in a plastic bottle, and create an object with the absolute worst utility-to-cost ratio. The object utility ends the moment you drink all the water, the plastic will stay as a residue for thousands years.

But like a professor once said: water is free - therefor we pollute the rivers with plastic by selling bottled water since free water doesn’t contribute to the GDP.

This discussion (how long should objects last?) is fundamentally tied to current economic practice and incentives.

Therefore, these should be more durable, even if they're not something we're otherwise attached to.

You could also think about the consequences of something breaking, and the cost of the loss of use.

E.g., for a car, if it breaks down you might run the risk of an accident, and while it's broken down you might not be able to commute to work, etc., whereas some things are relatively inconsequential when they break.

https://unbreakableumbrella.com/

A sort of sentimentality and pride. Maybe you chipped in somewhere along the chain, all the socks in the city have a little bit of your blood, sweat, and tears in the fibers. I think we try to replicate these sensations with all the green-washed corporate mission statement bullshit, and psychologically I think it's a very successful line. Practically, though, not so much.

This of course comes with the curing of all the one-size-fits all shit, too.

But from a design standpoint, there are four major components to the umbrella.

The cover, the stem, the handle, and the lever-branches (if collapsible) or straight branches (otherwise).

The cover is typically a synthetic polymer based material. In collapsible models, due to levers and fiddly connections it's hugely PITA to replace. If it rips or develops a hole you could theoretically push to use a more readily patchable material, however, the high tension at which this is often maintained will rapidly break down many approaches to patching. Realistically, this sort of thing is best done at a factory given the input costs.

The stem and handle virtually never break down and can be any form of metal or wood, depending upon whether you want a telescopic collapsible design or rigid full length. Aluminium is supposed to be the best recyclable metal in terms of recovery rate and is also light, however is prone to deformation in thin configurations. It may be possible to consider carbon fiber, which is very cheap now.

The lever-branches of a collapsible model are the biggest problem. They are fiddly, prone to breakage in most designs, and in most designs relatively tedious and difficult to securely re-attach to the cover should the cover require replacement.

Original suggestion: Design instead a standard interface between the umbrella stem and the cover-and-lever assembly. This would allow easily replacement of the cover-and-lever assembly as the most frequently broken portion. Alternatively, seek out a full length umbrella with strong branches instead of the tiny collapsible ones. Probably these days you could make them with carbon fiber quite cheaply.

> The Recyclable Umbrella is a reappraisal of the potential for plastic, a material which if properly managed offers carbon savings and excellent recyclability when compared with many organic alternatives.

(ignoring that this construction would probably break on a moderately windy day, and naively assumes that it won't end up on a landfill only because it could be recycled)

and then purposely over-engeneer the "long-lived" variant so it weighs 1.7 kilos and is practically unusable, you have motivated reasoning.

The whole artsy handwaving of this piece also ignores that planned obsolescence often happens in products where the amount of uses is well-known and generally independent on the product's materials, e.g. dishwashers, fridges, etc.

If you're expecting modest or radical changes (with presumably big boosts in efficiency, performance, etc.), why build a long life span product? In a rapidly changing environment, keeping old equipment can be detrimental. Servers can last longer than what they are rated for. Depending on SKU, Intel CPUs are rated for 3, 5, or even 10 years of use, however, servers are refreshed/replaced because of the ongoing performance increases per unit electrical consumption from newer CPU SKUs. In businesses where IT equipment isn't core to the business, old equipment is kept around if IT efficiency isn't really a concern, there's a very high cost of re-engineering, or re-certifying a system.

If changes are not reasonably expected, then build products that last a long time. One of my children will inherit my kitchenaid blender.

A line between each "useful longevity" point, to the respective "physical longevity" point (which in turn could be colored for "benign" or "harmful"), would be provocative.

I can actually see all 3 of these umbrellas as being repairable, just by different methods, and if I were forced to use any of them, I would definitely attempt to keep them working as long as I could. Maybe that's the ultimate lesson here.

An example is a coffee lid, sometimes it's active use is less than six seconds, but it's 'actual' life may be over a thousand years.

A thousand years of "sleep", during which it may be reused or recycled by those in the future in some as yet unknown way, meanwhile continuing to store the energy that was expended in its production. I like to think of "waste" as things which are merely not currently useful.

I bought a cheap Chinese umbrella for $10. It almost never gets used. It probably is not designed to be repairable or durable yet I have had it for over ten years so the environmental impact is minimal. It is also very lightweight so I have it with me often.

So, out of 100 uses of the durable umbrella, or 100 uses of the garbage umbrellas (across six of those), which is a more pleasant experience? Am I wrong to think that it's the obvious one? The umbrella that doesn't flex in the wind like it's going to snap off? The one that doesn't feel slimy for the three days it'll take to dry, the one in fact that won't take that long to dry? The one that doesn't accumulate grime but if it did could easily be wiped off and then be as clean as the day it was bought new? How often does thermoset plastic get a bad mix and end up being a little more brittle than usual? How often does the injection mold not fill completely, but it sails past QA, and so the umbrella handle will snap off when there's a gust... and with my luck when I'm halfway between the car and the building? If someone had a toddler chewing on it, or a dog, which holds up better? The worst you can say about the stainless steel is that it might prompt a trip to the dentist.

For anything that I'll use throughout my life, I think I prefer the "durable", unless it's just impossible from an engineering standpoint or is cost-prohibitive.

Is there any project that tracks these high durability items?