Announcing: the Teardown Library

A community of product designers searching for inspiration

While we’re all in the thick of social distancing and starved for in-person connection, I’d like to announce something for us product design freaks to look forward to: the Teardown Library.

The Teardown Library is an archive of disassembled physical products, new and old, hosted in Bolt’s offices in Boston and San Francisco. We hope it will be a gathering point for product designers, engineers, and technologists who want to learn from the work of our peers in a hands-on way. Today we’re opening the signup for founding members.

One of the first steps in my design process is to research how people have solved similar problems in the past. The creations that make up the digital and physical world around us represent the iterative work of generations of designers continuously evolving solutions to the ever-changing context of our daily lives. Looking at products inside and out reveals the fingerprints of the designers, clever engineering tricks, and clues to the priorities of the companies that build them.

If you work with physical products, I guarantee you have boxes and boxes of products you’ve worked on, previous generations of similar products you’ve studied, packaging samples…on and on. Instead of them gathering dust, we should be sharing.

The Teardown Library will be publishing a list of archived products we have on hand for viewing and sharing available inventories of member collections. Library members can stop by library locations during operating hours to pull a product from the archives and check it out. We’ll also occasionally get new products donated and host small groups to do new teardowns together. You’ll likely run into folks from ID studios, product development firms, and design-driven companies big and small.

We can geek out together about injection molding texturing, clever double-shot parts, hidden witness lines, rigid flex origami, and ship-in-a-bottle assemblies. We can obsess over button feel, bask in the glory of Y2K, debate Snow White vs Jony-era. In the collection we have:

• Modern classics: the Macbook Pro, iPod Classic, the PSP, the Dyson Vacuum, Nintendo 64, etc
• Classic classics: Olivetti Lettera 22
• Recently infamous: the Magic Leap One, the Juicero Press
• Radically-intentioned designs: the iMac G4, One Laptop per Child XO-1
• Multi-generational lineage of devices: iPhones, Logitech mice

Obviously the actual getting-together-in-groups will have to wait until the public health situation improves, but if you’re interested, I’d love to hear from you today.

The Teardown Library is founded on the belief that inspiration often comes from serendipitous sources. In one of my all-time favorite TV series, Connections, one of my all-time favorite historians, James Burke, tells fascinating stories of the collisions of inspiration and influence that have sparked change. We’re hoping to provide the raw material and the social space for similar sparks to fly.

“You can only know where you’re going if you know where you’ve been.” — James Burke

Hope to see you soon!

~Tyler

Big thanks to Greg Wood for the site design collab. Check out his rad music/art zine Pushkin Prefers. Your earbones and eyeballs will thank you.