Repairable Flatpack toaster

Longer lifespan: Investigating the reduction of e-waste through strategies of repair and flatpack assembly in designing sustainable electronic appliances.

Introduction

The repairable flatpack toaster project is about designing a toaster that can be assembled and repaired by users.  The purpose of the project is using the toaster as an example to demonstrate the feasibility of DIY assemblable and repairable consumer products.  It also serves the purpose to challenge the way how products are designed and manufactured in general.  

The toaster itself can be flatpacked in a box with all the components in there.  Users can assemble the toaster from scratch and repair the toaster when it breaks.  The idea is to extend the lifespan of the toaster through the concept of repair and circular economy.  Users learn the mechanism and the structure of the toaster during the process of assembly and would therefore feel more confident to repair the toaster by themselves.

SOLUTION

I first tried to approach this problem with the concept of emotional design.  If people could be more emotionally attached to products, perhaps they would be less likely to throw them away.  However, the concept of emotional design does not work very well on electrical appliances because their functional value outweighs the emotional value.  Therefore, the functional value of electrical appliances has to be maintained first before we can talk about how to increase the emotional value.

The approach I took was design for repair.  The concept of repair is used to maintain the functional value of appliances by extending the lifespan of products.  Therefore, I camp up with the idea of a repairable toaster.  The flatpack and self assembly design is used to enhance the experience of repair because I believe if people could assemble something from scratch, they would feel more confident and comfortable to repair it. 

PROCESS

The initial idea was to make a repairable toaster only and I started by understanding how toasters work.

I disassembled two toasters to study their structures and found that it was extremely hard to take toasters apart without breaking them.  They were not meant to be taken apart and repaired.  Even if people wanted to repair them, they were designed and manufactured in a way that prevents people from doing so.  

I realized that it was not enough to just design a repairable toaster.  I wanted to challenge the idea that people are not encouraged to take electrical or electronic products apart and repair them. If people could assemble toasters from scratch, they could repair them.  This could also bring them a sense of achievement, which might give them an emotional attachment to their toasters.  Therefore, I decided to make a toaster that was not just repairable but also flat packed.

Prototypes

The development process highly depended on prototype making and 3D CAD modeling.  It was hard for me to just sketch out the structure of the toaster because sketching does not always reflect how physical things work. Therefore, making physical prototypes was my only option at the earlier stage of development.  I made cardboard prototypes, MDF prototypes, paperboard prototypes and eventually metal prototypes.

I made two metal prototypes on my own and the second one was very successful because it worked as intended.  It could be assembled and disassembled without problems.  The timer and heating elements also worked.

Prior to building metal prototypes, I built 3D CAD models first.  It took time to build metal prototypes so I chose to validate and modify my design with Solidworks before building metal prototypes.  3D CAD file was also needed for metal plasma cutting.  

Final Prototype

After the second metal prototype, I realized that I could not make a very polished prototype with the facilities at school, therefore I decided to outsource the prototype to a factory.

The design of the final prototype is almost identical to the second metal prototype I made.  I added a tray to the bottom and two pieces of metal inside for heat insulation.  The prototype is a lot more polished than the previous ones.

Components of the toaster can be flatpacked.

The toaster passed the PAT test.

It toasts!!

The assembly instruction.

User Test

I invited 4 participants to assemble the prototype with the assembly instruction.  User tests were documented and recorded.  

The purpose of the test was to evaluate the effectiveness of the assembly instruction and observe the process of assembly.  I also asked for their overall experiences of assembling the toaster.