skin, skeleton and guts framework makes gadgets modular
Image via TED talk
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Greening our gadgets comes down to just a handful of basic principles -- minimizing energy consumption, making them last as long as possible, and creating them to be hackable, fixable and upgradeable.
2010 TEDGlobal Fellow Dominic Muren has come up with a way of thinking about gadgets that not only brings all of these important elements of design together, but makes them unforgettable. He compares them to human body parts in his Skin, Skeleton and Guts framework.
Muren points out that nature designs things with modularity in mind -- look across the animal kingdom and you'll see the same basic components simply restructured: skeletons, skin, organs, all essentially the same thing but modified and replaceable.
What if we designed our electronics to be the same way? Nothing so specialized that it can't be used in just one gadget, but could be "transplanted" into other gadgets as needed? We would cut down on a vast amount of energy consumption drawn during the production of parts, we would make gadgets last longer because they'd be modifiable, upgradeable, and fixable with easy-to-access parts, and ultimately we'd minimize our e-waste output.
It's a design theory we're constantly praising, but looking at it in the same way as a body puts a unique spin on it. Check out Muren's brief TED talk:
Essentially, gadgets are all the same already -- hard drives, LED screens, small batteries... it isn't too much of a leap to think that we could begin manufacturing gadgets in a more modularized way so that parts are interchangeable among types of devices, among brands, among generations of equipment. It just takes enough forward-thinking and big-picture action from manufacturers, and a demand from consumers who aren't afraid to break open their electronics, to make it happen. No, not every electronic device could be part of the concept -- some are too highly specialized. But among consumer devices, this could most certainly be the case.
We certainly love the idea of comparing this type of manufacturing to the human body -- after all, it's the human body that electronics quite literally impact on a daily basis from fabrication to recycling.
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