This is missing the fact that the stainless steel from the ultra-durable umbrella is also easy to recycle. In fact, steel is far easier to recycle than any kind of plastic.
Also, the whole work seems to skip over the huge problem of insufficient customer information: There is a remark in there, that lots of people (about half) seem to choose the ultra-durable umbrella, rather than one of the less resource-intensive ones. The reason for this imho isn't that people don't care about the resources. It is rather that everyone has been conditioned to assume that products are crappier than specified. People do not and usually can not know how durable each product they are offered will be. And buying something ultra-durable-seeming at least gives you a chance at a decent product lifetime. All the rest is usually crappier than expected.
One reason is that the environmentally friendlier alternatives are often also materials of lesser quality. E.g. recycled plastic degrades and is more brittle than "fresh".
The other reason is greedy manufacturers, saving on necessary materials, making products less durable. And maybe intentionally building in weak points, limiting lifetime to sell more stuff.
Aside but one interesting consequence of using plastic in certain kinds of products is that it can be a sacrificial part. If you don’t design a point of failure into your system one will be assigned to it. I recently had this realization after installing a new garage door opener. The motor on it is much stronger than my old one but some parts are far flimsier. Then it dawned on me that I’d rather have a cheap plastic gear break if something goes wrong than have it burn up the unit or swing a high tension belt around.
Longevity doesn’t always mean making everything out of cast iron and stainless steel. It can mean making the thing repairable using cheap and available parts.
3D printing options aside, there's no possibility of me replacing random plastic components that break. I'm dependent on some industrial manufacturer producing the random plastic broken part for me, and getting it to me. If something metallic fails, it's much simpler in comparison to fashion a replacement / repair the failure myself. I can work with metal. I can't work with plastic.
On the subject of sacrificial parts, approx. 25 years ago I bought a lawnmower from a well established UK brand (Atco). The original design included a clutch-like mechanism that would decouple the drive from the drum blades if they encountered a serious obstruction and jammed. In the model that I bought, however, the mechanism had been replaced with a sacrificial plastic cog that would simply break if the blades jammed. Even though I was careful, on average, it would break every two to three years. This was before easy 3D printing was available, and I had no choice but to order an OEM replacement. If Atco had sold packs of the cog I wouldn't have minded, but instead you had to buy an entire repair kit with several other parts that weren't needed. After the fourth time it died, I replaced the entire lawn mower with a non-Atco alternative.
I've come across sacrificial parts in other contexts where they make perfect sense (e.g. holding car body parts in place) but I really don't like them being used as an opportunity for manufacturers to increase their lifetime profit from a long-lived product.
Ideally that plastic gear would be a standard size and shape that you could find described in a parts list somewhere in the manual. I'd much rather be able to buy one out of a giant surplus bin somewhere in mainland china than trying to measure it and find/make a bespoke replacement.
Replaceable fuses make great failure points for things like motors that can draw silly amounts of current when stalled.
Will you be able to get those parts, how fast and how cheap, and how easy/hard is it to replace them? Garage door, maybe... it's an expensive thing... you'll investa lot of time/effort to get it fixed... buta battery powered drill? No way to get the parts. Someone mentione 3d printing... can you imagine some average drill owner designing a part for 3d printing, buying a 3d printer, going through the learning curve to get a usable part.. for a $50 drill? No way. Just having someone open it up to replace it is more expensive than the drill itself. On the other hand, you could pay 20 cents more when buying and got a long-lastin metal part.
If you want a part to fail to not cause greater damage, add some kinf of a standardized fuse to it, or detect the overload and stop it, before it fails. Yeah, sure, something is going to fail at some time (nothing lasts forever), but treating plastic gears that break (instead fo $1 more expensive metal ones) as a good thing,.. i have to disagree with that.
Recyclability isn't really an issue, because the steel umbrella is not viable as a product. This is on account of its weight.
> Total weight of assembled umbrella: 1.71kg
The average umbrella, and the plastic one at the link, weigh roughly a quarter of that amount. There are golf umbrellas, considered extremely heavy, at ~0.9kg, e.g.: https://shedrain.com/products/vortex-vent-pro
The ultra-durable umbrella is an exercise in making a product that appears to be an umbrella out of heavy-duty materials. But it's not an umbrella that's viable as a commercial product; it wasn't designed with the average user's capabilities in mind. Most people, even trained athletes, would not be happy to lug around an umbrella that weighs nearly four pounds.
I'm sure it's possible to strike a balance, perhaps with aluminum or magnesium (expensive!) instead of steel. But the project didn't attempt it -- it went with steel to make a point. In real-life product engineering, though, every gram saved is worth celebrating.
This is a beautifully done art project, but it's curious how relevant comparisons made are to reality. The handle could be easily made of tubes for massive weight reduction and potentially improved rigidity, for example.
It seems the idea is to take an existing umbrella, reproduce it faithfully in different materials, and then comparing results: like right-clicking an umbrella_object displayed on a 3D modeling tool and changing texture bitmaps. I suppose justification to that is it has to be apples to apples comparison.
But that's not how objects are manufactured in the real world: Parts are designed for specific materials and means of fabrication.
Replicating existing man-made object with a manufacturing method the object was not intended to be manufactured with leads to subpar results. If I'm making something out of carbon fiber, I'd try to minimize numbers of screw holes. If it's to be made of aluminum, I'd avoid repeated stresses, but if it's to be made of steel, flexure joints becomes an option. If I'm 3D printing something, I'd try to minimize overhangs below 45 degrees. If I'm designing for injection molding, I'd avoid wide flat surfaces and abrupt changes in cross sections. If I'm milling something, I'd repeatedly check for tool clearances, try to minimize amounts removed(which may result in thicker walls), and avoid complex curves as I design it.
I'm not going to take an J-shaped umbrella grip and instruct a factory worker to EDM it out of pre-tempered glass block. Even if I managed to have it done, and if it ended up weighing as much as a steel handle, that won't tell much about viability of glass-framed umbrella in general.
My James Smith & Sons Umbrella has a lightweight steel frame (apparently invented by James Smith the 2nd in 1851) - weighs about 500g and has lasted 30+ years.
Mass is a tradeoff too, but I suppose you could shove half of the weight without compromising the durability. Would that still not be a viable product then? Something a tad heavier than standard big umbrella, much more expensive, but nearly indestructible?
I'd go for it. And yes, I'm very much the kind of user who says they'd go for durable umbrella and, at the same time, also says they use an umbrella very infrequently. Well, that's because umbrellas suck donkey balls, to borrow a phrase from the Expanse. I avoid the light ones as even a little breeze makes them flip their shape from convex to concave and eventually break struts. The heavier ones... well, they all seem to magically break within couple months, so it's always a lottery if I pick one with torn fabric or hanging strut, and then when I do, then what? Throw away the looks-fixable-but-really-too-cheeply-made-to-be-fixed one, and buy another one, fourth one this fall? The whole experience makes me avoid umbrellas except for the heaviest of rains, and it's mostly because of lack of durability.
> In real-life product engineering, though, every gram saved is worth celebrating.
I would like to point out that I'm old enough that I think I've witnessed how aluminum soda cans have become much thinner over the years. Their contents are of course under pressure and that makes them a bit sturdier; they can be stacked 10 feet high with no problem. Usually. But someone tosses a case a little too hard, packing them in a truck, the angle that the force of that jolts off a few degrees... something, and the can just explodes and makes a mess. And the economics may mean that even with that loss it's still better financially, but this seems wrong to me somehow.
If it were only disposable cans I could probably ignore it. But everyone's shaving milligrams here and there, to the point that you'll get a potato peeler at the store because the last one broke, to bring the new one home and compare it... only to find out it was stamped out of even thinner steel. It breaks next month. You can't shop around and find a better one, they're all pumped out of the same no-name factory that a forensic accountant probably couldn't track down if he had access to all of the supply chain's paperwork.
A friend and I were discussing just a few weeks ago whether or not duct tape was of vastly different quality when we were small children (late 1970s) compared to today. I of course realize that 4 yr old me might have a much more difficult time tearing off a piece of identical duct tape that 50 year old me could tear without trying... but I seem to remember even my dad having to put a little too much effort. You really did have to rip into the stuff.
When you shave these milligrams off of items, it looks like it is win/win, that you're reducing cost without reducing any quality that anyone cares about, but I think that it might be true that you're shaving little pieces off of everyone's lives. Too little for them to complain about, but the sum total of that unpleasantness must be vast. I am not inclined to celebrate it.
Why was the handle made of stainless steel, and not, say, wood ? Looks to be a significant fraction of mass, while not being the typical part that would break ?
Recycleability isn’t really an issue because there isnt really a consumer pipeline for recycling metals of nonstandard shapes like cans. You certainly can’t just throw it in the recycling bin, and anything else is more friction.
> The reason for this imho isn't that people don't care about the resources. It is rather that everyone has been conditioned to assume that products are crappier than specified.
Personally I'm very aware of the labor and resources required to build a high quality item. This is why I buy them. It's made by humans, with great effort, to have a long life.
Honestly, I want all my items to "positively age" with me as much as possible, and even if they become slightly insufficient (storage devices, or electronics in general), I try to find uses for them until they reach their true end of their life.
And yes, I don't like crappy items. I want to buy one item once (or as few times possible) and have good performance performing its function. It can be an umbrella, a shoe, a keyboard or a pen. Anything, actually.
Another reason I seek the durable version is that I despise change.
Once I procure an umbrella that meets my needs, I don’t ever want to have to spend the time to go find another. If I manage to wear it out, I will grudgingly replace it with the exact same thing but if that’s not available I’ll go without rather than going through the process of finding a good one again. Modern casual clothing is a disaster in this regard because even the same sku often won’t be the same product year over year.
About clothing: that and society tends to mock those who repeat the same clothes in a short period of time, promoting cheap/mass fashion and therefore waste.
I would rather focus on upcycling repairable clothes rather than promoting so much waste. Specially when a sweater I love tears, I (1) loss the sweater and (2) can't get said clothing item because as you say, the sku or even the brand may not exist anymore. Newer is not always better, both in function and form.
Point in case: Mark Zuckerberg and his style change from a anime/cartoon closet full of grey tshirts and blue jeans to a typical sugar daddy atire/style just to appeal to bigger audience without any internal change.
Also keep in mind that metal is stronger than plastic. Sure it might rust if you don't use a preventitive coating....a coating is not a paint BTW theirs a massive difference.
Plastic is cheaper. Sure those injection molds are expensive as fuck to make and have a limited life just like anything but the major reason plastic is seen as desirable is that its cheap, and its way easier to produce 10000 plastic spoons than to cast 10000 spoons. Casting isn't fast and takes up a lot of space and its harder to heat up metal than plastic. And even if your machining a part, plastic is just cheaper when it comes to the footprint and the density of plastic is lower than metal which means handling raw materials is easier.
The downside is recycling and lifespan. A good metal part beats plastic when it comes to so many tests....but its not fast or cheap to make.
Is the metal recyclable....yes....but plastic dosnt have to get up to insane temps to get it molten, and you can machine plastic with basically anything as long as its sharp, while metal machining is a process that needs really strong sharp inserts, saws, or EDM machines, and all of that means a heavier footprint both in weight,and carbon footprint.
> Many of the objects we use daily are made from mixed materials, ones are often difficult to separate [for recycling]. This cost can outweigh the value of the materials, so these objects are very likely to end up in Landfill. Of course, mixing materials offers functional benefits such as combinations of soft & hard structures, and nowhere else is this more true [than] with Umbrellas.
Ya this was the first thing I saw. It's a student project so we should be open that he's learning, but I wouldn't call this umbrella recyclable if it's constituent parts will likely end up floating in the ocean forever.
If umbrella's were built with repairability in mind I would love it, though. So many I've used were destined to break under the strain of the wind.
It really sucks when the product is so fragile you can't do it. Items do not have inherent, fixed purpose, they're physical objects. If I can use my umbrella as a hammer in a pinch, that's a value-add.
@dang it would be good to link to the student's original website with RCA rather than this reproduction on Core 77. The article at Core 77 is almost entirely copy-pasted, and doesn't add any value.
Lots of really interesting work across a huge range of disciplines, from industrial design like this, through digital stuff and service design, to architecture, to fine art, to animation. I've been many times. It's hell on my feet but worth it!
This is an exercise in externalities. Sure, maybe the cheap umbrella comes out ahead in a raw materials game: X number of crummy ones may be more eco-friendly than a nice one that lasts Y times as long.
As long as you don’t consider anything else, like the fact you have to employ Y times the person-hours to make the crummy ones, and Y times the freight to deliver them, and Y times the customer getting pissed off that their cheap umbrella broke and they have to take time out of their day to acquire a replacement.
I swore off buying junky stuff a long time ago. Life’s too short to be surrounded by crap that’s going to break the first time you look at it wrong, student projects be damned.
(That doesn’t mean I only buy luxury items. Far from it! You can get Levi’s Premium line jeans that last X longer than the discount store ones for far less than X times the price. I’ve worn the same pair of leather boots for 6 years now. I’ve had my Birkenstocks resoled several times now instead of throwing them out while the rest of the sandal’s in great shape. It’s usually pretty easy to find the quality version of a given thing for not much more than the junky one.)
I agree with some of your points, but what about the frustration when someone breaks their nice & expensive umbrella by accident, or has it stolen from them? What about the inconvenience and anxiety of not wanting to lose it? What about not having a spare to lend (but actually give) to a friend or loved one?
Those are valid concerns, but I've found I keep my nicer stuff way longer than the cheaper things they replace.
I'm happy if I make it through a couple months with $30 sunglasses. I've had the same nicer ones for more than proportionally longer. For me, the difference is that I'm more watchful of the nice things. I'm not about to take off my good sunglasses and leave them somewhere that I'll forget about them. I know where my nice (not expensive, just nice and functional) water bottle is. I've kept the same pocket knife for many years because I'd go back and get it if I forgot to put it right back in my pocket after using it, which I wouldn't do, because it's nice and I subconsciously keep track of it.
However, I'm not dogmatic about this stuff. I want to own my stuff and not have it own me. There's a half-empty six pack of dirt cheap portable umbrellas over next to my shoe rack so I can dole them out to my kids who'll inevitably lose them at school.
Many years ago, I used to like expensive pens. Over the years, they were either stolen, lost, or damaged, so I realized the futility of expensive pens. Now I'm used to disposable pens, where I don't have to worry about whatever happens to them.
At the same time, I have a lime-green plastic mechanical pencil that I got from a Microsoft printer room, and it's probably about 8 years old by now. This one never gets stolen, lost, or damaged.
The ability to quickly and more broadly insure any item, that would actually be a great economic incentive for higher quality goods. What the manufacturer doesn’t make in sales could be offset with insurance, and being a purely financial product doesn’t generate an impact in energy use, residues, etc… in addition to being a steady revenue, something companies today are trying to get with all sorts of membership plans.
Hmm, I’m not sure what it means to consider the Y times as many people being employed making umbrellas as an externality. I mean, there are more damaging (for the world) and more unpleasant (for them) things they could get up to.
bought a pair of levis in december, they now have a hole in the crouch! this is the second pair in two years that have done that. thought it might be user error, but they used to not do this.
Excellent article. I’m fascinated with this subject.
There is a temple in Japan that exists for hundreds of years. It’s the same temple only in a “Ship of Theseus” sense, as it gets rebuilt every 20 years by experts. But in a sense, it’s the same temple.
Or take another example: dressing shoe. A shoemaker can reform your father’s and grandfather’s shoe back to brand new if you so desire. The materials are easily sourced, all it takes is trained labor.
Why can’t we have this for everything?
Modern economic practice has optimized for cutting back intensive labour dependency in favor of simpler disposable goods. It’s a “win” from multiple angles: less durable goods means more sales, costs of materials and residue are externalized anyway so that makes up your margin, and you don’t have to deal with expert workers demanding better pay. It’s beautifully optimized - just not optimized for what matters.
If you think about it, bottled water is the ultimate bullshit product. We put a freely occurring natural element in a plastic bottle, and create an object with the absolute worst utility-to-cost ratio. The object utility ends the moment you drink all the water, the plastic will stay as a residue for thousands years.
But like a professor once said: water is free - therefor we pollute the rivers with plastic by selling bottled water since free water doesn’t contribute to the GDP.
This discussion (how long should objects last?) is fundamentally tied to current economic practice and incentives.
The name for this is the Baumol Effect [1]. Sometimes called the "cost disease".
The only real way to fix it is to increase the relative price of raw materials used compared to labor. Yes, this means government intervention, because it's a market failure.
A carbon tax would be a start, but there might have to be a non-renewable raw materials tax in the future, as well.
Slightly tangential. Somebody needs to eli5 why baumol effect is supposed to be so paradoxical or special. Of course services will tend to cost more over time as other industries generate wealth increases. The value of an orchestra performance is relative, two hours of enjoying art. Those two hours of enjoying art are not a commodity, they will cost whatever share of disposal income people like to spend on it.
I've encountered it so many times now, and for whatever reason, my mind grinds to a halt, why is this a discovery, what are the implications, why is it meaningful? Not being facetious, sincerely asking.
Myself (and a few others) fought to get rid of bottled water from our office. A location with great tap water quality. Filtered water dispensers. But still people wanted to have their (worse quality) bottled water. Eventually we won...
I never understood the hate against bottled water. If you're on the go and get thirsty, what's wrong with getting water instead of an unhealthy soda? I can't drink only beer.
Choosing between bottled water or soda/beer is the false dichotomy. Bottled water wasn’t mass produced prior the 90s, but started being heavily promoted since Pepsi and CocaCola would go out of business with people cutting back soda consumption.
I’m amazed how well their marketing worked to convince people that water is literally toxic unless it comes bottled.
I have a funny story: I went to a place here in the country with natural mineral water springs, the absolute purest water dripping straight from the rock - but visitors (US and Europe) not only requested but insisted bottled water during the stay. The funny part is the bottled water comes from the same place.
I don't think it's hate for usage of bottled water outside of home/on trip/in transit. The hate is about people using bottled water in their home en masse even if they have it for "free" in kitchen. Some been not consider drinking water from public services and don't trust and public assurances of its quality.
I carry around a water bottle but in a lot of places, the only area you can refill is the public restroom. I'm npt filling my drinks from there. but if there was areas with clean filtered water, I'd even pay for it.
because of all the oil and plastic (which comes from oil) that is used to get it to you means more emissions which contributes to global climate change.
>If you think about it, bottled water is the ultimate bullshit product. We put a freely occurring natural element in a plastic bottle, and create an object with the absolute worst utility-to-cost ratio. The object utility ends the moment you drink all the water, the plastic will stay as a residue for thousands years.
Oh my! I have been telling people just this. The sheer number of people who consume and throw this needlessly created packages is baffling. We have figured out water and its sanitation for most of the cases now. Just carrying a reusable bottle with water from home, and refilling potable water from sources you trust would save the environment from a lot of empty bottles. I would not say everyone can do this. But a lot of us can do this. Besides the bottles with less than a litre capacity are the worst.
I think they're missing a dimension, how annoying is something to replace. In particular for car tires this called out to me. Going to an auto shop is an all day adventure for me, whereas almost anything else can easily be ordered or picked up without too much hassle. Furniture is another category though where there's a non trivial investment required to replace it.
Therefore, these should be more durable, even if they're not something we're otherwise attached to.
You could also think about the consequences of something breaking, and the cost of the loss of use.
E.g., for a car, if it breaks down you might run the risk of an accident, and while it's broken down you might not be able to commute to work, etc., whereas some things are relatively inconsequential when they break.
Semi-off-topic, but I carry a unbreakable umbrella and have been very happy with it. Worth a try if you are interested in a real world application of this post.
I think I'm missing the joke. Is it just an umbrella, or is it a weapon as well?... They seem to constantly allude to it being a weapon. Is it just because it's strong?
Objects should completely break down 1d after warranty expires so we can sell another one to the customer. This will increase economic growth, profits and GDP and helps with yacht purchases
I think Gandhi sorta covers the penultimate conclusion of this train, and that's highly local production.
A sort of sentimentality and pride. Maybe you chipped in somewhere along the chain, all the socks in the city have a little bit of your blood, sweat, and tears in the fibers. I think we try to replicate these sensations with all the green-washed corporate mission statement bullshit, and psychologically I think it's a very successful line. Practically, though, not so much.
This of course comes with the curing of all the one-size-fits all shit, too.
But from a design standpoint, there are four major components to the umbrella.
The cover, the stem, the handle, and the lever-branches (if collapsible) or straight branches (otherwise).
The cover is typically a synthetic polymer based material. In collapsible models, due to levers and fiddly connections it's hugely PITA to replace. If it rips or develops a hole you could theoretically push to use a more readily patchable material, however, the high tension at which this is often maintained will rapidly break down many approaches to patching. Realistically, this sort of thing is best done at a factory given the input costs.
The stem and handle virtually never break down and can be any form of metal or wood, depending upon whether you want a telescopic collapsible design or rigid full length. Aluminium is supposed to be the best recyclable metal in terms of recovery rate and is also light, however is prone to deformation in thin configurations. It may be possible to consider carbon fiber, which is very cheap now.
The lever-branches of a collapsible model are the biggest problem. They are fiddly, prone to breakage in most designs, and in most designs relatively tedious and difficult to securely re-attach to the cover should the cover require replacement.
Original suggestion: Design instead a standard interface between the umbrella stem and the cover-and-lever assembly. This would allow easily replacement of the cover-and-lever assembly as the most frequently broken portion. Alternatively, seek out a full length umbrella with strong branches instead of the tiny collapsible ones. Probably these days you could make them with carbon fiber quite cheaply.
Yeah, sorry. If you prop-up the "recyclable" umbrella with corpospeak sentences like this one:
> The Recyclable Umbrella is a reappraisal of the potential for plastic, a material which if properly managed offers carbon savings and excellent recyclability when compared with many organic alternatives.
(ignoring that this construction would probably break on a moderately windy day, and naively assumes that it won't end up on a landfill only because it could be recycled)
and then purposely over-engeneer the "long-lived" variant so it weighs 1.7 kilos and is practically unusable, you have motivated reasoning.
The whole artsy handwaving of this piece also ignores that planned obsolescence often happens in products where the amount of uses is well-known and generally independent on the product's materials, e.g. dishwashers, fridges, etc.
How is the technology in a product expected to change over time?
If you're expecting modest or radical changes (with presumably big boosts in efficiency, performance, etc.), why build a long life span product? In a rapidly changing environment, keeping old equipment can be detrimental. Servers can last longer than what they are rated for. Depending on SKU, Intel CPUs are rated for 3, 5, or even 10 years of use, however, servers are refreshed/replaced because of the ongoing performance increases per unit electrical consumption from newer CPU SKUs. In businesses where IT equipment isn't core to the business, old equipment is kept around if IT efficiency isn't really a concern, there's a very high cost of re-engineering, or re-certifying a system.
If changes are not reasonably expected, then build products that last a long time. One of my children will inherit my kitchenaid blender.
That "Pretty Illogical" blob on the bottom-right would be all the plastic packaging in the world.
A line between each "useful longevity" point, to the respective "physical longevity" point (which in turn could be colored for "benign" or "harmful"), would be provocative.
An interesting thing is the graph mapping user bond against physical longevity: https://res.cloudinary.com/rca2020/image/upload/f_webp,h_108.... I would love something like this with more object, but also a third dimension, how possible it is to do it yourself. For example, wooden furniture is pretty doable, and considering the strong user bond and long-lasting life, I see why so many people pick up woodworking.
I can actually see all 3 of these umbrellas as being repairable, just by different methods, and if I were forced to use any of them, I would definitely attempt to keep them working as long as I could. Maybe that's the ultimate lesson here.
An example is a coffee lid, sometimes it's active use is less than six seconds, but it's 'actual' life may be over a thousand years.
A thousand years of "sleep", during which it may be reused or recycled by those in the future in some as yet unknown way, meanwhile continuing to store the energy that was expended in its production. I like to think of "waste" as things which are merely not currently useful.
That's a nice thought, but unfortunately the environmental cost of "storing" all of this material - i.e. all the billions of tonnes of plastic pollution already out there, and in there (inside you in the form of microplastics) - doesn't come for free.
It's a current problem, and we don't seem to have the technology or even the political will to solve it currently.
Once you start optimising for one parameter the other ones suffer. Over 500g for an umbrella is not acceptable in the space age.
I bought a cheap Chinese umbrella for $10. It almost never gets used. It probably is not designed to be repairable or durable yet I have had it for over ten years so the environmental impact is minimal.
It is also very lightweight so I have it with me often.
If I have to use the stainless steel umbrella x6 just for it to be equal to the garbage-tier plastic umbrella, then I will landfill six of the plastic umbrellas. I know it's meant to be recyclable, and I will dutifully put it in the recycle bin, but then my city government will contract it out to some outfit that picks through to find some token recyclables and sends the rest to landfill anyway.
So, out of 100 uses of the durable umbrella, or 100 uses of the garbage umbrellas (across six of those), which is a more pleasant experience? Am I wrong to think that it's the obvious one? The umbrella that doesn't flex in the wind like it's going to snap off? The one that doesn't feel slimy for the three days it'll take to dry, the one in fact that won't take that long to dry? The one that doesn't accumulate grime but if it did could easily be wiped off and then be as clean as the day it was bought new? How often does thermoset plastic get a bad mix and end up being a little more brittle than usual? How often does the injection mold not fill completely, but it sails past QA, and so the umbrella handle will snap off when there's a gust... and with my luck when I'm halfway between the car and the building? If someone had a toddler chewing on it, or a dog, which holds up better? The worst you can say about the stainless steel is that it might prompt a trip to the dentist.
For anything that I'll use throughout my life, I think I prefer the "durable", unless it's just impossible from an engineering standpoint or is cost-prohibitive.
A find this topic fascinating, and several times in the past I tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to buy items (mainly clothing and shoes/boots) that are made to last a long time.
Is there any project that tracks these high durability items?
This is missing the fact that the stainless steel from the ultra-durable umbrella is also easy to recycle. In fact, steel is far easier to recycle than any kind of plastic.
Also, the whole work seems to skip over the huge problem of insufficient customer information: There is a remark in there, that lots of people (about half) seem to choose the ultra-durable umbrella, rather than one of the less resource-intensive ones. The reason for this imho isn't that people don't care about the resources. It is rather that everyone has been conditioned to assume that products are crappier than specified. People do not and usually can not know how durable each product they are offered will be. And buying something ultra-durable-seeming at least gives you a chance at a decent product lifetime. All the rest is usually crappier than expected.
One reason is that the environmentally friendlier alternatives are often also materials of lesser quality. E.g. recycled plastic degrades and is more brittle than "fresh".
The other reason is greedy manufacturers, saving on necessary materials, making products less durable. And maybe intentionally building in weak points, limiting lifetime to sell more stuff.
Aside but one interesting consequence of using plastic in certain kinds of products is that it can be a sacrificial part. If you don’t design a point of failure into your system one will be assigned to it. I recently had this realization after installing a new garage door opener. The motor on it is much stronger than my old one but some parts are far flimsier. Then it dawned on me that I’d rather have a cheap plastic gear break if something goes wrong than have it burn up the unit or swing a high tension belt around.
Longevity doesn’t always mean making everything out of cast iron and stainless steel. It can mean making the thing repairable using cheap and available parts.
3D printing options aside, there's no possibility of me replacing random plastic components that break. I'm dependent on some industrial manufacturer producing the random plastic broken part for me, and getting it to me. If something metallic fails, it's much simpler in comparison to fashion a replacement / repair the failure myself. I can work with metal. I can't work with plastic.
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On the subject of sacrificial parts, approx. 25 years ago I bought a lawnmower from a well established UK brand (Atco). The original design included a clutch-like mechanism that would decouple the drive from the drum blades if they encountered a serious obstruction and jammed. In the model that I bought, however, the mechanism had been replaced with a sacrificial plastic cog that would simply break if the blades jammed. Even though I was careful, on average, it would break every two to three years. This was before easy 3D printing was available, and I had no choice but to order an OEM replacement. If Atco had sold packs of the cog I wouldn't have minded, but instead you had to buy an entire repair kit with several other parts that weren't needed. After the fourth time it died, I replaced the entire lawn mower with a non-Atco alternative.
I've come across sacrificial parts in other contexts where they make perfect sense (e.g. holding car body parts in place) but I really don't like them being used as an opportunity for manufacturers to increase their lifetime profit from a long-lived product.
Ideally that plastic gear would be a standard size and shape that you could find described in a parts list somewhere in the manual. I'd much rather be able to buy one out of a giant surplus bin somewhere in mainland china than trying to measure it and find/make a bespoke replacement.
Replaceable fuses make great failure points for things like motors that can draw silly amounts of current when stalled.
This really depends on many factors.
Will you be able to get those parts, how fast and how cheap, and how easy/hard is it to replace them? Garage door, maybe... it's an expensive thing... you'll investa lot of time/effort to get it fixed... buta battery powered drill? No way to get the parts. Someone mentione 3d printing... can you imagine some average drill owner designing a part for 3d printing, buying a 3d printer, going through the learning curve to get a usable part.. for a $50 drill? No way. Just having someone open it up to replace it is more expensive than the drill itself. On the other hand, you could pay 20 cents more when buying and got a long-lastin metal part.
If you want a part to fail to not cause greater damage, add some kinf of a standardized fuse to it, or detect the overload and stop it, before it fails. Yeah, sure, something is going to fail at some time (nothing lasts forever), but treating plastic gears that break (instead fo $1 more expensive metal ones) as a good thing,.. i have to disagree with that.
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Recyclability isn't really an issue, because the steel umbrella is not viable as a product. This is on account of its weight.
> Total weight of assembled umbrella: 1.71kg
The average umbrella, and the plastic one at the link, weigh roughly a quarter of that amount. There are golf umbrellas, considered extremely heavy, at ~0.9kg, e.g.: https://shedrain.com/products/vortex-vent-pro
The ultra-durable umbrella is an exercise in making a product that appears to be an umbrella out of heavy-duty materials. But it's not an umbrella that's viable as a commercial product; it wasn't designed with the average user's capabilities in mind. Most people, even trained athletes, would not be happy to lug around an umbrella that weighs nearly four pounds.
I'm sure it's possible to strike a balance, perhaps with aluminum or magnesium (expensive!) instead of steel. But the project didn't attempt it -- it went with steel to make a point. In real-life product engineering, though, every gram saved is worth celebrating.
This is a beautifully done art project, but it's curious how relevant comparisons made are to reality. The handle could be easily made of tubes for massive weight reduction and potentially improved rigidity, for example.
It seems the idea is to take an existing umbrella, reproduce it faithfully in different materials, and then comparing results: like right-clicking an umbrella_object displayed on a 3D modeling tool and changing texture bitmaps. I suppose justification to that is it has to be apples to apples comparison.
But that's not how objects are manufactured in the real world: Parts are designed for specific materials and means of fabrication. Replicating existing man-made object with a manufacturing method the object was not intended to be manufactured with leads to subpar results. If I'm making something out of carbon fiber, I'd try to minimize numbers of screw holes. If it's to be made of aluminum, I'd avoid repeated stresses, but if it's to be made of steel, flexure joints becomes an option. If I'm 3D printing something, I'd try to minimize overhangs below 45 degrees. If I'm designing for injection molding, I'd avoid wide flat surfaces and abrupt changes in cross sections. If I'm milling something, I'd repeatedly check for tool clearances, try to minimize amounts removed(which may result in thicker walls), and avoid complex curves as I design it.
I'm not going to take an J-shaped umbrella grip and instruct a factory worker to EDM it out of pre-tempered glass block. Even if I managed to have it done, and if it ended up weighing as much as a steel handle, that won't tell much about viability of glass-framed umbrella in general.
My James Smith & Sons Umbrella has a lightweight steel frame (apparently invented by James Smith the 2nd in 1851) - weighs about 500g and has lasted 30+ years.
https://www.james-smith.co.uk/product/umbrellas/gents-umbrel...
Mass is a tradeoff too, but I suppose you could shove half of the weight without compromising the durability. Would that still not be a viable product then? Something a tad heavier than standard big umbrella, much more expensive, but nearly indestructible?
I'd go for it. And yes, I'm very much the kind of user who says they'd go for durable umbrella and, at the same time, also says they use an umbrella very infrequently. Well, that's because umbrellas suck donkey balls, to borrow a phrase from the Expanse. I avoid the light ones as even a little breeze makes them flip their shape from convex to concave and eventually break struts. The heavier ones... well, they all seem to magically break within couple months, so it's always a lottery if I pick one with torn fabric or hanging strut, and then when I do, then what? Throw away the looks-fixable-but-really-too-cheeply-made-to-be-fixed one, and buy another one, fourth one this fall? The whole experience makes me avoid umbrellas except for the heaviest of rains, and it's mostly because of lack of durability.
> In real-life product engineering, though, every gram saved is worth celebrating.
I would like to point out that I'm old enough that I think I've witnessed how aluminum soda cans have become much thinner over the years. Their contents are of course under pressure and that makes them a bit sturdier; they can be stacked 10 feet high with no problem. Usually. But someone tosses a case a little too hard, packing them in a truck, the angle that the force of that jolts off a few degrees... something, and the can just explodes and makes a mess. And the economics may mean that even with that loss it's still better financially, but this seems wrong to me somehow.
If it were only disposable cans I could probably ignore it. But everyone's shaving milligrams here and there, to the point that you'll get a potato peeler at the store because the last one broke, to bring the new one home and compare it... only to find out it was stamped out of even thinner steel. It breaks next month. You can't shop around and find a better one, they're all pumped out of the same no-name factory that a forensic accountant probably couldn't track down if he had access to all of the supply chain's paperwork.
A friend and I were discussing just a few weeks ago whether or not duct tape was of vastly different quality when we were small children (late 1970s) compared to today. I of course realize that 4 yr old me might have a much more difficult time tearing off a piece of identical duct tape that 50 year old me could tear without trying... but I seem to remember even my dad having to put a little too much effort. You really did have to rip into the stuff.
When you shave these milligrams off of items, it looks like it is win/win, that you're reducing cost without reducing any quality that anyone cares about, but I think that it might be true that you're shaving little pieces off of everyone's lives. Too little for them to complain about, but the sum total of that unpleasantness must be vast. I am not inclined to celebrate it.
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Why was the handle made of stainless steel, and not, say, wood ? Looks to be a significant fraction of mass, while not being the typical part that would break ?
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Recycleability isn’t really an issue because there isnt really a consumer pipeline for recycling metals of nonstandard shapes like cans. You certainly can’t just throw it in the recycling bin, and anything else is more friction.
> The reason for this imho isn't that people don't care about the resources. It is rather that everyone has been conditioned to assume that products are crappier than specified.
Personally I'm very aware of the labor and resources required to build a high quality item. This is why I buy them. It's made by humans, with great effort, to have a long life.
Honestly, I want all my items to "positively age" with me as much as possible, and even if they become slightly insufficient (storage devices, or electronics in general), I try to find uses for them until they reach their true end of their life.
And yes, I don't like crappy items. I want to buy one item once (or as few times possible) and have good performance performing its function. It can be an umbrella, a shoe, a keyboard or a pen. Anything, actually.
Another reason I seek the durable version is that I despise change.
Once I procure an umbrella that meets my needs, I don’t ever want to have to spend the time to go find another. If I manage to wear it out, I will grudgingly replace it with the exact same thing but if that’s not available I’ll go without rather than going through the process of finding a good one again. Modern casual clothing is a disaster in this regard because even the same sku often won’t be the same product year over year.
About clothing: that and society tends to mock those who repeat the same clothes in a short period of time, promoting cheap/mass fashion and therefore waste.
I would rather focus on upcycling repairable clothes rather than promoting so much waste. Specially when a sweater I love tears, I (1) loss the sweater and (2) can't get said clothing item because as you say, the sku or even the brand may not exist anymore. Newer is not always better, both in function and form.
Point in case: Mark Zuckerberg and his style change from a anime/cartoon closet full of grey tshirts and blue jeans to a typical sugar daddy atire/style just to appeal to bigger audience without any internal change.
Stupid monkey brains.
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Yep - even the most famous clothing SKU in the world, the Levi’s 501, changes fabric specs and measurements year over year.
For me a reason to choose the not so durable umbrella is that I tend to lose umbrellas rather than break them.
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Also keep in mind that metal is stronger than plastic. Sure it might rust if you don't use a preventitive coating....a coating is not a paint BTW theirs a massive difference.
Plastic is cheaper. Sure those injection molds are expensive as fuck to make and have a limited life just like anything but the major reason plastic is seen as desirable is that its cheap, and its way easier to produce 10000 plastic spoons than to cast 10000 spoons. Casting isn't fast and takes up a lot of space and its harder to heat up metal than plastic. And even if your machining a part, plastic is just cheaper when it comes to the footprint and the density of plastic is lower than metal which means handling raw materials is easier.
The downside is recycling and lifespan. A good metal part beats plastic when it comes to so many tests....but its not fast or cheap to make. Is the metal recyclable....yes....but plastic dosnt have to get up to insane temps to get it molten, and you can machine plastic with basically anything as long as its sharp, while metal machining is a process that needs really strong sharp inserts, saws, or EDM machines, and all of that means a heavier footprint both in weight,and carbon footprint.
> Many of the objects we use daily are made from mixed materials, ones are often difficult to separate [for recycling]. This cost can outweigh the value of the materials, so these objects are very likely to end up in Landfill. Of course, mixing materials offers functional benefits such as combinations of soft & hard structures, and nowhere else is this more true [than] with Umbrellas.
FTA with context added.
Ya this was the first thing I saw. It's a student project so we should be open that he's learning, but I wouldn't call this umbrella recyclable if it's constituent parts will likely end up floating in the ocean forever.
If umbrella's were built with repairability in mind I would love it, though. So many I've used were destined to break under the strain of the wind.
Agreed on using energy consumption and how many times do you reasonably expect to use it as important considerations.
Additionally you have to factor in the toxicity you introduce, especially with things like cookware.
An umbrella maybe a 1000 times (massive upper bound), but a le creuset pot I would expect to use 3000 times, and we eat the foot made in it.
All true, but one missing is the one where people abuse things and use them in ways that were not intended by the manufacturer.
It really sucks when the product is so fragile you can't do it. Items do not have inherent, fixed purpose, they're physical objects. If I can use my umbrella as a hammer in a pinch, that's a value-add.
@dang it would be good to link to the student's original website with RCA rather than this reproduction on Core 77. The article at Core 77 is almost entirely copy-pasted, and doesn't add any value.
Original: https://2021.rca.ac.uk/students/charlie-humble-thomas/
For anyone in or near London, the RCA degree show is worth a visit:
https://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/rca2024/
Lots of really interesting work across a huge range of disciplines, from industrial design like this, through digital stuff and service design, to architecture, to fine art, to animation. I've been many times. It's hell on my feet but worth it!
Thank you! The Core 77 version was chewing up my CPU.
Same thing happened to me so I'm glad I'm not the only one.
The other cool thing about the original article is you can find other student projects there - some of which are quite fun.
@dang is a no-op. Someone shoot off an email.
This is an exercise in externalities. Sure, maybe the cheap umbrella comes out ahead in a raw materials game: X number of crummy ones may be more eco-friendly than a nice one that lasts Y times as long.
As long as you don’t consider anything else, like the fact you have to employ Y times the person-hours to make the crummy ones, and Y times the freight to deliver them, and Y times the customer getting pissed off that their cheap umbrella broke and they have to take time out of their day to acquire a replacement.
I swore off buying junky stuff a long time ago. Life’s too short to be surrounded by crap that’s going to break the first time you look at it wrong, student projects be damned.
(That doesn’t mean I only buy luxury items. Far from it! You can get Levi’s Premium line jeans that last X longer than the discount store ones for far less than X times the price. I’ve worn the same pair of leather boots for 6 years now. I’ve had my Birkenstocks resoled several times now instead of throwing them out while the rest of the sandal’s in great shape. It’s usually pretty easy to find the quality version of a given thing for not much more than the junky one.)
I agree with some of your points, but what about the frustration when someone breaks their nice & expensive umbrella by accident, or has it stolen from them? What about the inconvenience and anxiety of not wanting to lose it? What about not having a spare to lend (but actually give) to a friend or loved one?
Those are valid concerns, but I've found I keep my nicer stuff way longer than the cheaper things they replace.
I'm happy if I make it through a couple months with $30 sunglasses. I've had the same nicer ones for more than proportionally longer. For me, the difference is that I'm more watchful of the nice things. I'm not about to take off my good sunglasses and leave them somewhere that I'll forget about them. I know where my nice (not expensive, just nice and functional) water bottle is. I've kept the same pocket knife for many years because I'd go back and get it if I forgot to put it right back in my pocket after using it, which I wouldn't do, because it's nice and I subconsciously keep track of it.
However, I'm not dogmatic about this stuff. I want to own my stuff and not have it own me. There's a half-empty six pack of dirt cheap portable umbrellas over next to my shoe rack so I can dole them out to my kids who'll inevitably lose them at school.
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Many years ago, I used to like expensive pens. Over the years, they were either stolen, lost, or damaged, so I realized the futility of expensive pens. Now I'm used to disposable pens, where I don't have to worry about whatever happens to them.
At the same time, I have a lime-green plastic mechanical pencil that I got from a Microsoft printer room, and it's probably about 8 years old by now. This one never gets stolen, lost, or damaged.
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Insurance.
The ability to quickly and more broadly insure any item, that would actually be a great economic incentive for higher quality goods. What the manufacturer doesn’t make in sales could be offset with insurance, and being a purely financial product doesn’t generate an impact in energy use, residues, etc… in addition to being a steady revenue, something companies today are trying to get with all sorts of membership plans.
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Hmm, I’m not sure what it means to consider the Y times as many people being employed making umbrellas as an externality. I mean, there are more damaging (for the world) and more unpleasant (for them) things they could get up to.
Making glass is probably a good industry to work in, but we don’t wish to employ window breakers to keep them busy.
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There's also Y times more marketing, which is the more damaging negative externality.
bought a pair of levis in december, they now have a hole in the crouch! this is the second pair in two years that have done that. thought it might be user error, but they used to not do this.
Where did you get them? They make jeans as nice or as cheaply as stores want to carry.
This thread is representative of what I’m talking about: https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/comments/uf591v/has_le...
The pair you find at an outlet is not the same as what you’d get from their online store, let alone their “premium” or “vintage” lines.
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Excellent article. I’m fascinated with this subject.
There is a temple in Japan that exists for hundreds of years. It’s the same temple only in a “Ship of Theseus” sense, as it gets rebuilt every 20 years by experts. But in a sense, it’s the same temple.
Or take another example: dressing shoe. A shoemaker can reform your father’s and grandfather’s shoe back to brand new if you so desire. The materials are easily sourced, all it takes is trained labor.
Why can’t we have this for everything?
Modern economic practice has optimized for cutting back intensive labour dependency in favor of simpler disposable goods. It’s a “win” from multiple angles: less durable goods means more sales, costs of materials and residue are externalized anyway so that makes up your margin, and you don’t have to deal with expert workers demanding better pay. It’s beautifully optimized - just not optimized for what matters.
If you think about it, bottled water is the ultimate bullshit product. We put a freely occurring natural element in a plastic bottle, and create an object with the absolute worst utility-to-cost ratio. The object utility ends the moment you drink all the water, the plastic will stay as a residue for thousands years.
But like a professor once said: water is free - therefor we pollute the rivers with plastic by selling bottled water since free water doesn’t contribute to the GDP.
This discussion (how long should objects last?) is fundamentally tied to current economic practice and incentives.
The name for this is the Baumol Effect [1]. Sometimes called the "cost disease".
The only real way to fix it is to increase the relative price of raw materials used compared to labor. Yes, this means government intervention, because it's a market failure.
A carbon tax would be a start, but there might have to be a non-renewable raw materials tax in the future, as well.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Slightly tangential. Somebody needs to eli5 why baumol effect is supposed to be so paradoxical or special. Of course services will tend to cost more over time as other industries generate wealth increases. The value of an orchestra performance is relative, two hours of enjoying art. Those two hours of enjoying art are not a commodity, they will cost whatever share of disposal income people like to spend on it.
I've encountered it so many times now, and for whatever reason, my mind grinds to a halt, why is this a discovery, what are the implications, why is it meaningful? Not being facetious, sincerely asking.
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Myself (and a few others) fought to get rid of bottled water from our office. A location with great tap water quality. Filtered water dispensers. But still people wanted to have their (worse quality) bottled water. Eventually we won...
Bottled water is invaluable in places where the naturally occurring water is not potable.
It is. That also isn’t the reason keeping anyone in the bottled water business.
The top 10 bottled water markets are countries with good to excellent public water service.
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I never understood the hate against bottled water. If you're on the go and get thirsty, what's wrong with getting water instead of an unhealthy soda? I can't drink only beer.
Choosing between bottled water or soda/beer is the false dichotomy. Bottled water wasn’t mass produced prior the 90s, but started being heavily promoted since Pepsi and CocaCola would go out of business with people cutting back soda consumption.
I’m amazed how well their marketing worked to convince people that water is literally toxic unless it comes bottled.
I have a funny story: I went to a place here in the country with natural mineral water springs, the absolute purest water dripping straight from the rock - but visitors (US and Europe) not only requested but insisted bottled water during the stay. The funny part is the bottled water comes from the same place.
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I don't think it's hate for usage of bottled water outside of home/on trip/in transit. The hate is about people using bottled water in their home en masse even if they have it for "free" in kitchen. Some been not consider drinking water from public services and don't trust and public assurances of its quality.
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I carry around a water bottle but in a lot of places, the only area you can refill is the public restroom. I'm npt filling my drinks from there. but if there was areas with clean filtered water, I'd even pay for it.
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because of all the oil and plastic (which comes from oil) that is used to get it to you means more emissions which contributes to global climate change.
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>I can't drink only beer.
Can't? Don't sell yourself short.
>If you think about it, bottled water is the ultimate bullshit product. We put a freely occurring natural element in a plastic bottle, and create an object with the absolute worst utility-to-cost ratio. The object utility ends the moment you drink all the water, the plastic will stay as a residue for thousands years.
Oh my! I have been telling people just this. The sheer number of people who consume and throw this needlessly created packages is baffling. We have figured out water and its sanitation for most of the cases now. Just carrying a reusable bottle with water from home, and refilling potable water from sources you trust would save the environment from a lot of empty bottles. I would not say everyone can do this. But a lot of us can do this. Besides the bottles with less than a litre capacity are the worst.
I think they're missing a dimension, how annoying is something to replace. In particular for car tires this called out to me. Going to an auto shop is an all day adventure for me, whereas almost anything else can easily be ordered or picked up without too much hassle. Furniture is another category though where there's a non trivial investment required to replace it.
Therefore, these should be more durable, even if they're not something we're otherwise attached to.
You could also think about the consequences of something breaking, and the cost of the loss of use.
E.g., for a car, if it breaks down you might run the risk of an accident, and while it's broken down you might not be able to commute to work, etc., whereas some things are relatively inconsequential when they break.
Car tires take about an hour and are actually one of the things I buy used every time. 90% of the tread for 1/4 the price.
Semi-off-topic, but I carry a unbreakable umbrella and have been very happy with it. Worth a try if you are interested in a real world application of this post.
https://unbreakableumbrella.com/
I think I'm missing the joke. Is it just an umbrella, or is it a weapon as well?... They seem to constantly allude to it being a weapon. Is it just because it's strong?
Isn't any umbrella obviously looking like a weapon? Am I the only one who role-played it's a rifle as a kid (and still do as an adult, sometimes)?
And then, a well-made long umbrella would effectively double as a cane, at which point it fits well in the martial art of Bartitsu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartitsu
EDIT: see also Bartitsu reference and other applications here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbrella#As_a_weapon_of_attack.
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I love the videos, but 200$ is a hard pill to swallow for an umbrella!
Especially if living in Japan. You had best hope it came with a GPS tracker.
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The durable umbrella weighs in at 1.7 kg / 3.7 lb, four times what a normal umbrella would weigh. That is absurdly impractical.
From TFA: [...] the assumption of 'less but better' being a superior approach to product design is rarely practically evaluated.
The third umbrella in the series takes durability to an almost cartoon-like level [...]
This was a study of materials and design, not a product someone would like to sell . It's research on object longevity.
Yes, but with all studies, it can be made in an objective way or in a way that already enforces a particular conclusion.
This is why, in serious scientific work, so much focus is placed on methods and reproducibility.
Here he used the less rigorous field of arts and design to wiggle out of that responsibility and present a blatantly biased study.
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Objects should completely break down 1d after warranty expires so we can sell another one to the customer. This will increase economic growth, profits and GDP and helps with yacht purchases
I think Gandhi sorta covers the penultimate conclusion of this train, and that's highly local production.
A sort of sentimentality and pride. Maybe you chipped in somewhere along the chain, all the socks in the city have a little bit of your blood, sweat, and tears in the fibers. I think we try to replicate these sensations with all the green-washed corporate mission statement bullshit, and psychologically I think it's a very successful line. Practically, though, not so much.
This of course comes with the curing of all the one-size-fits all shit, too.
Of course it's going to be a commercial question.
But from a design standpoint, there are four major components to the umbrella.
The cover, the stem, the handle, and the lever-branches (if collapsible) or straight branches (otherwise).
The cover is typically a synthetic polymer based material. In collapsible models, due to levers and fiddly connections it's hugely PITA to replace. If it rips or develops a hole you could theoretically push to use a more readily patchable material, however, the high tension at which this is often maintained will rapidly break down many approaches to patching. Realistically, this sort of thing is best done at a factory given the input costs.
The stem and handle virtually never break down and can be any form of metal or wood, depending upon whether you want a telescopic collapsible design or rigid full length. Aluminium is supposed to be the best recyclable metal in terms of recovery rate and is also light, however is prone to deformation in thin configurations. It may be possible to consider carbon fiber, which is very cheap now.
The lever-branches of a collapsible model are the biggest problem. They are fiddly, prone to breakage in most designs, and in most designs relatively tedious and difficult to securely re-attach to the cover should the cover require replacement.
Original suggestion: Design instead a standard interface between the umbrella stem and the cover-and-lever assembly. This would allow easily replacement of the cover-and-lever assembly as the most frequently broken portion. Alternatively, seek out a full length umbrella with strong branches instead of the tiny collapsible ones. Probably these days you could make them with carbon fiber quite cheaply.
Yeah, sorry. If you prop-up the "recyclable" umbrella with corpospeak sentences like this one:
> The Recyclable Umbrella is a reappraisal of the potential for plastic, a material which if properly managed offers carbon savings and excellent recyclability when compared with many organic alternatives.
(ignoring that this construction would probably break on a moderately windy day, and naively assumes that it won't end up on a landfill only because it could be recycled)
and then purposely over-engeneer the "long-lived" variant so it weighs 1.7 kilos and is practically unusable, you have motivated reasoning.
The whole artsy handwaving of this piece also ignores that planned obsolescence often happens in products where the amount of uses is well-known and generally independent on the product's materials, e.g. dishwashers, fridges, etc.
How is the technology in a product expected to change over time?
If you're expecting modest or radical changes (with presumably big boosts in efficiency, performance, etc.), why build a long life span product? In a rapidly changing environment, keeping old equipment can be detrimental. Servers can last longer than what they are rated for. Depending on SKU, Intel CPUs are rated for 3, 5, or even 10 years of use, however, servers are refreshed/replaced because of the ongoing performance increases per unit electrical consumption from newer CPU SKUs. In businesses where IT equipment isn't core to the business, old equipment is kept around if IT efficiency isn't really a concern, there's a very high cost of re-engineering, or re-certifying a system.
If changes are not reasonably expected, then build products that last a long time. One of my children will inherit my kitchenaid blender.
That "Pretty Illogical" blob on the bottom-right would be all the plastic packaging in the world.
A line between each "useful longevity" point, to the respective "physical longevity" point (which in turn could be colored for "benign" or "harmful"), would be provocative.
An interesting thing is the graph mapping user bond against physical longevity: https://res.cloudinary.com/rca2020/image/upload/f_webp,h_108.... I would love something like this with more object, but also a third dimension, how possible it is to do it yourself. For example, wooden furniture is pretty doable, and considering the strong user bond and long-lasting life, I see why so many people pick up woodworking.
I thought its about programming and someone is planning to implement timer based garbage collectors.
As long as they can.
I can actually see all 3 of these umbrellas as being repairable, just by different methods, and if I were forced to use any of them, I would definitely attempt to keep them working as long as I could. Maybe that's the ultimate lesson here.
An example is a coffee lid, sometimes it's active use is less than six seconds, but it's 'actual' life may be over a thousand years.
A thousand years of "sleep", during which it may be reused or recycled by those in the future in some as yet unknown way, meanwhile continuing to store the energy that was expended in its production. I like to think of "waste" as things which are merely not currently useful.
That's a nice thought, but unfortunately the environmental cost of "storing" all of this material - i.e. all the billions of tonnes of plastic pollution already out there, and in there (inside you in the form of microplastics) - doesn't come for free.
It's a current problem, and we don't seem to have the technology or even the political will to solve it currently.
Is the full dissertation available anywhere? The link on the author's website is dead.
I'd just go with some kind of raincoat.
I really appreciate that they added weight to the description. Puts things into perspective. Nowadays typically umbrella weights 300 to 500 grams
Once you start optimising for one parameter the other ones suffer. Over 500g for an umbrella is not acceptable in the space age.
I bought a cheap Chinese umbrella for $10. It almost never gets used. It probably is not designed to be repairable or durable yet I have had it for over ten years so the environmental impact is minimal. It is also very lightweight so I have it with me often.
If I have to use the stainless steel umbrella x6 just for it to be equal to the garbage-tier plastic umbrella, then I will landfill six of the plastic umbrellas. I know it's meant to be recyclable, and I will dutifully put it in the recycle bin, but then my city government will contract it out to some outfit that picks through to find some token recyclables and sends the rest to landfill anyway.
So, out of 100 uses of the durable umbrella, or 100 uses of the garbage umbrellas (across six of those), which is a more pleasant experience? Am I wrong to think that it's the obvious one? The umbrella that doesn't flex in the wind like it's going to snap off? The one that doesn't feel slimy for the three days it'll take to dry, the one in fact that won't take that long to dry? The one that doesn't accumulate grime but if it did could easily be wiped off and then be as clean as the day it was bought new? How often does thermoset plastic get a bad mix and end up being a little more brittle than usual? How often does the injection mold not fill completely, but it sails past QA, and so the umbrella handle will snap off when there's a gust... and with my luck when I'm halfway between the car and the building? If someone had a toddler chewing on it, or a dog, which holds up better? The worst you can say about the stainless steel is that it might prompt a trip to the dentist.
For anything that I'll use throughout my life, I think I prefer the "durable", unless it's just impossible from an engineering standpoint or is cost-prohibitive.
A find this topic fascinating, and several times in the past I tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to buy items (mainly clothing and shoes/boots) that are made to last a long time.
Is there any project that tracks these high durability items?
Reddit r/BuyItForLife
That subreddit is basically just an ad for various crappy US brands. There is zero interest in discussion of actual BIFL products, or practices.
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I think the main market is people who buy umbrellas when it rains then leave them behind or pile them up in the garage.
Insurance period minus one standard deviation
I am confused by what people in the academic design/art community think the word ‘celebrate’ means.
industrial Design Student Work @data #story
TLDR: guy builds a bunch of umbrellas, but fails to answer the question posed in the title.
I think the point was to explore different approaches and spark discussion about what we care about.
The answer is “it depends”
At least we got to see a milspec umbrella.
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