What They Say
Fast Company reported that Dell is working to move to ‘circular design’ so that every part of its products can be recycled or reused rather than thrown out. By the end of the decade, for each product that it sells the company also aims to recycle or reuse an equivalent product.
Current products are not designed for recycling and if a product takes an hour to disassemble, it is not economic to recycle it. Dell’s design teams are meeting with recyclers to better understand the challenges.
In one prototype, for example, the team is testing a design that would let someone push a pin in the side of a device to trigger the whole thing popping apart. Ed Boyd, SVP of Dell Technologies Experience Design Group said:
“We want to go from something that might take an hour to disassemble fully to two minutes or less. That’s really the goal. It’s not an unachievable thing. It just hadn’t been a design point in the past.”
The company also wants to make products that last longer.
What We Think
It’s one thing to make computing hardware last longer – that’s certainly a worthy goal. However, over time, it gets harder and harder to run the latest apps and software. As we used to say when Andy Groves was at Intel and Bill Gates was at Microsoft “As Andy giveth, so Bill takes away”. Further, interfaces develop and up-to-date peripherals may not connect to older systems. (BR)
