Design Charette 2

Today we had our second design charette session. We all had to form groups of 5 or more and disassemble a chosen home appliance. My group was presented with the Breville Bread Toaster, which was kindly donated by Breville. The dis-assembly of the toaster was not as pleasurable as what I had first expected. The toaster had many different components in it that were all connected someway or another with heaps of screws. Moreover, they were all in different varieties and lengths, which was cumbersome to unscrew. After we have finally disassemble the product, we had to sort them out into different sub-assemblies and figure out the material from which they are made from. The data that we had collected was transferred into "Greenfly", http://greenflyonline.org/,  an online tool that determines the environment impacts that a particular product makes.

What we had found out was that the majority of the materials used were aluminum and polypropylene (PP), which may seems quite alright but the overall weight of the product was heavy - 2.516kg. In addition, we felt that the placement of certain components like the buttons, electrical components and heating element, could be relocated to reduce the overall size of the toaster. The key point here was reduce the overall weight and size of the toaster to aid in its transportation and packaging. Changing of the toaster's materials to a common material like for the aluminum and ABS parts, could be changed into PP, thus allowing it to be recycled easily and reducing the product's weight.

Here are some pictures from the design exercise:

Here are some of our sketches:

Overall, I have learned that as designers, we have to look at the whole product life cycle of the products that we design and play attention to the design decision and choices that we make. The materials we choose for our products, the overall form and shape of it, and the weight of the product are all examples of things to consider. If not, we will just be creating another wasteful product that will just land up in one of the many and diminishing landfills.Creating a product that is easy to disassemble is also critical, because it will be much easier to separate the parts of the product into its various material classification for recycling.