Design Product Lifetime Exercise

Today’s class exercise was a great one to experience whereby we got to disassemble a kitchen electronic product. Our team got the Breville Mix Master. The aim was to demonstrate that the way we design a product has a great impact on its lifetime. The reasons for disassembling were to see how the product was assemble, the various materials used, the number of components and how long we would take to disassemble.  

All these aspects impact the lifetime of a product whereby the longer time it takes to disassemble the product the more likely the company won’t  repair, upgrade or recycle components of the product as there is more money spent in disassembling it rather than creating a new product. This essentially impacted the environment.  It took us 55 minutes to disassemble the product which indicates that this product is most likely to go to landfill.

This exercise also demonstrated the problems and opportunities that come as a result in considering the assembly, part design and fasteners designs with a product.  As designers we should consider designing for durability, disassembly, repair, upgrade and recycling. The images below show the difficulties when disassembling the Mix Master as well as design improvements of making the mix master more durable, easier to disassemble and repair/upgrade which will dramatically reduce the effect on the environment, extend usage and encourage the reuse of resources.