I saw this a long time ago and was recently reminded of it while looking in to ikea furniture mods. The idea of standardised, open source hardware intrigues me and some of the examples showing...
I saw this a long time ago and was recently reminded of it while looking in to ikea furniture mods.
The idea of standardised, open source hardware intrigues me and some of the examples showing someone pulling apart one design and creating something totally different are delightful. Just the practice of snapping measurements to a standard grid mean a lot of things simply fit together without modification.
There are a lot of issues I see though and I would love to see creative people come up with solutions. One big issue I saw is a lot of these open structures designs look very flimsy and would fail much faster than their non modular versions. Sure, if you design a bike out of metal square beams full of holes and bolts you retain the ability to pull it apart and make something else but it wouldn't last nearly as long as a bike with a frame that was welded together. Also I will always need a bike, I will use that frame for a very long time so its not like its wasted.
On the other hand there are items that don't last very long like electronics which often only have one minor part fail and it kills me knowing the whole thing is going to waste when there are so many parts inside of it that are still fully functioning.
I'm also frustrated by the lack of standardisation between products that do the same thing. There are currently countless different designs for a bike through axle even though it does exactly the same thing on every bike. It cost me $70 to buy a new one despite it being a metal tube with a thread on one end. The price comes from it being such a low volume item because every fork has its own axle size you end up way over paying or finding out there are no longer any replacement parts being produced.
Its a sad state of things but I'm hopeful we can design better systems to reduce our waste and bring back a culture of repairability.
I saw this a long time ago and was recently reminded of it while looking in to ikea furniture mods.
The idea of standardised, open source hardware intrigues me and some of the examples showing someone pulling apart one design and creating something totally different are delightful. Just the practice of snapping measurements to a standard grid mean a lot of things simply fit together without modification.
There are a lot of issues I see though and I would love to see creative people come up with solutions. One big issue I saw is a lot of these open structures designs look very flimsy and would fail much faster than their non modular versions. Sure, if you design a bike out of metal square beams full of holes and bolts you retain the ability to pull it apart and make something else but it wouldn't last nearly as long as a bike with a frame that was welded together. Also I will always need a bike, I will use that frame for a very long time so its not like its wasted.
On the other hand there are items that don't last very long like electronics which often only have one minor part fail and it kills me knowing the whole thing is going to waste when there are so many parts inside of it that are still fully functioning.
I'm also frustrated by the lack of standardisation between products that do the same thing. There are currently countless different designs for a bike through axle even though it does exactly the same thing on every bike. It cost me $70 to buy a new one despite it being a metal tube with a thread on one end. The price comes from it being such a low volume item because every fork has its own axle size you end up way over paying or finding out there are no longer any replacement parts being produced.
Its a sad state of things but I'm hopeful we can design better systems to reduce our waste and bring back a culture of repairability.