Product Design by Conny Bakker

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From the course by Universiteit Leiden

A Circular Economy of Metals: Towards a Sustainable Societal Metabolism

11 оценки

Universiteit Leiden

A Circular Economy of Metals: Towards a Sustainable Societal Metabolism

11 оценки

Metals are present everywhere around us and are one of the major materials upon which our economies are built. Economic development is deeply coupled with the use of metals. During the 20th century, the variety of metal applications in society grew rapidly. In addition to mass applications such as steel in buildings and aluminium in planes, more and more different metals are in use for innovative technologies such as the use of the speciality metal indium in LCD screens. A lot of metals will be needed in the future. It will not be easy to provide them. In particular in emerging economies, but also in industrialised countries, the demand for metals is increasing rapidly. Mining and production activities expand, and with that also the environmental consequences of metal production. In this course, we will explore those consequences and we will also explore options to move towards a more sustainable system of metals production and use. We will focus especially on the options to reach a circular economy for metals: keeping metals in use for a very long time, to avoid having to mine new ones. This course is based on the reports of the Global Metals Flows Group of the International Resource Panel that is part of UN Environment. An important aspect that will come back each week, are the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs. Those are ambitious goals to measure our progress towards a more sustainable world. We will use the SDGs as a touching stone for the assessment of the metals challenge, as well as the solutions we present in this course to solve that challenge.

From the lesson

Solutions to the Metals Challenge

Week 4 is rather packed with lectures on the different options to solve the metals challenge. You will meet experts from all over the world, who will lecture on materials and product design-for-environment and design-for-recycling, on the possibilities and also the barriers for remanufacturing, and on recycling as the last, but maybe most important resort to keep the metals in use. All these options aim at keeping up the stock-in-use of metals in society, while at the same time reducing the need to mine new metals. They all have their own strengths and limitations and can be regarded as pieces of the large puzzle aiming at solving the metals challenge, or in other words, reconciling the different SDGs.

Possible Solutions5:13

Recycling Rates for Metals by Thomas E. Graedel9:04

Materials Design for Recycling by Erik Offerman (Part 1)10:14

Materials Design for Recycling by Erik Offerman (Part 2)12:10

Product Design by Conny Bakker5:27

Remanufacturing15:37

Meet the Instructors

Ester van der Voet
Dr.
Institute of Environmental Sciences

Hello, I am Conny Bakker and

I am an expert in product design at Delft University of Technology.

And today I want to talk to you about design strategies for

longer lasting products.

Product design is not just about making products look good.

Designers also have to understand how the product's materials are produced,

like the metal ore you see in this picture, and

how these materials are assembled into products.

And they have to think about how products are used and repaired and

upgraded, like the fair phone in this picture, and then how they are discarded.

And of course we need to take into account what happens at our end of life.

Most of the time, when we look at a product's life cycle from production,

use, to end-of-life, it is a kind of linear system.

This is the linear economy where stuff is taken from the environment,

used, and then discarded.

From a business perspective,

when you think about it a linear economy makes no sense.

If you throw away products, you completely lose the value that's still in them.

The aim of the circular economy is to reclaim as much of this

embedded value in a product as possible, over and over again,

so you get this circular value loop.

From a product design perspective,

if we want to preserve value over time, we should design products that

can last longer to slow down the flow of resources through the economy.

And the question is what can we do as product designers to make

products last longer.

In other words to make them easy to love, to repair, to remanufacture.

We have created six design strategies and I'm going to address these one by one.

But you may notice that their order is not coincidental.

And perhaps you can start thinking about why they are ordered this way.

And I'll come back to this at the end of the video.

The first strategy is design for attachment and trust.

This is a toy giraffe.

New and after nine years of hugging.

It's made from a fragile material and

it teaches me that we don't need to make things extremely sturdy as long as

people are willing to take good care of the products.

The toy shows the power of product attachment.

Design jeans can take wear and tear quite well.

And some brands like Nudie Jeans in this picture have made this into

a fashion statement.

It shows that in some cases we embrace the fact that our products show signs

of wear over time.

But for many other products, we don't like this.

And product designers, then,

need to choose materials that remain as new as possible.

This is the free universal construction kit.

With it, you can 3D print construction blocks that link ten different kinds of

construction toys like Duplo, Fischertechnik, K'Nex and Lego.

And for me, this is the ultimate example of a product that merges

the strategies of standardization and compatibility.

I'll explain the fourth strategy through a project we did at TU Delft.

It's called value added repair and it explores how we can use

3D printing to repair products and at the same time add value to them.

For instance this hedge trimmer, it's repaired with an ergonomic handle.

And a broken pan handle becomes a place where you can put your spoon.

A broken teacup is revamped into a tea set, and

a broken bike is repaired with an attachment for a bicycle light.

This is a design for a modular telephone, the Google Ara.

Dividing up a phone in several functional modules, like a camera module,

and a battery module, makes it easy to upgrade the phone, and

also makes the product adaptable to your personal needs.

And the IKEA's shelter was built for refugees.

It was designed, using IKEA's famous expertise with do-it-yourself assembly,

but it can also be disassembled easily to be reused.

So these are the six strategies for

longer lasting products. I asked you about the order in which they are presented.

We have used the Inertia Principle by Professor Walter Stahel

to order these strategies.

And this says, do not repair what is not broken.

Do not remanufacture something that can be repaired.

And do not recycle a product that can be remanufactured.

Replace or treat only the smallest possible part in order to

maintain the existing economic value.

It means that we need to keep our products at a highest level of integrity for

as long as possible.

This is reflected in our six strategies for product life extension.

They move from high product integrity to low product integrity.

I hope I have stimulated you to see the lifetime of the products that surround you

in a new light.

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