Design for servicability and manufacturability
 11/20/05
In a perfect world, a machine should be easy to maintain and service, even to a novice. This will never happen of course, but there are a few guidelines and case studies that will help you.
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Gotta Makea Product Service Systems
11/15/05
The world of product design is a world of contradictions. Often, maybe too often, we end up with products which are almost inexplicable in their scope, cost, or production of waste, realative to their function. There is, for example, an object which is one of the most engineered and reengineered products in the world. It has required ultra-precise material forming technologies to be created. Numerous scientific papers are devoted to it's composition and fabrication. Formally, it has undergone at least a dozen changes since its invention. But for all this work, thinking, and money spent in research and development, the average lifespan of a soda can is 10 minutes. Chances are, you aren't even thinking about the can when you drink the drink. This disparity of service (a drink of soda) and product (the can that holds it) got the business world and the design world thinking together: Why can't we sell just the service, rather than throwing away all this valuable stuff that helps convey our services. The concept of a Product Service System was born.
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The Cultural Technology Divide
11/08/05
Humans had an edge from the getgo. We had to. Our kids are horribly weak when they're born, and they have to fumble around for a few years before they're even close to ready to strike out on their own. But that's where the edge comes in. It's not tools -- we were making things work long before the first clovis point or stone hammer. Humanity survived, and prospered using social technologies. Forming groups, trading favors for status, shunning outsiders. These technologies co-existed with the onset of technology, and for a while, even prospered from them; tablets make better record keepers of alliances than brains. Lately though, in our ever more technological world, we face a growing gap between the physical technologies that change our behavior, and the cultural technologies that help us deal with it. This gap is causing all kinds of trouble.
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Big Things Come In Small Packages
11/02/05
In the 30 years since the electronic revolution, nothing in the product design world has grown faster than our desire for smaller and smaller products. This is all well and good, but the market demands that the smaller the device, the more feature packed it becomes. Inevitably, a designer's job becomes one of fitting, cramming, and folding functionality into tighter spaces. So, with that in mind, why not contort your next contraption with some of these great folding examples.
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Copyright 2004-2006
Dominic Muren and IDFuel Team
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