Design That Lasts: Design Proposition
Re-framing the Desktop Monitor with Flexible Kits
Team: Claire Yoon, Jisoo Shon, Julia Nishizaki, Matt Muenzer
Taking Things Apart
Through our analysis, we’ve understood that desktop monitors are incredibly prevalent in homes and businesses throughout the world¹ and becoming increasingly prevalent with escalating needs for dispersed working environments² and popular streaming and e-sports industries,³ while distributed as ready-to-dispose products featuring non-reusable industrial materials with a linear and unshakeable lifecycle.
There is actually ample room, however, for intervention in a monitor’s construction, delivery, repair, disposal, and overall user relationship. We’ve begun to reimagine the monitor as a simple kit that home users in particular can better assemble, modify, maintain, and understand. Monitors might eschew their rigid plastic cases and instead find themselves in sustainably-sourced and -cyclable cases that click and twist together. They might become a part of a home or a hobby, rather than pre-fabricated plastic accessories tossed as soon as any of their parts is obviated by damage or boredom.
The monitor as a simple kit that home users in particular can better assemble, modify, maintain, and understand.
Framing the life-cycle
Pre-Use
The kit comes to life as its parts are ordered to specification and manufactured individually, largely from laser-cut or injection-molded natural materials, aside from the LCD.
In-Use
Once distributed, a user assembles their monitor and stand kits. Due to their modular nature, they can easily customize, personalize, and repair the product in the next few years. A few examples of customization include changing the frame of the monitor, switching out the stand for one with more articulation, or popping open the monitor case and swapping out for a higher-res or touch screen panel. When parts of the kit like the stand are replaced, the old ones can be recycled.
Post-Use
The user can return any part of their kit to a first- or third-party service to return material back to the supply chain and resource pool.
Putting Things Back Together
Reframing the monitor as a simple kit underscores some crucial areas of its design that current standards neglect to approach, outside of the display panel itself. In particular, the kit would create a participatory and transparent relationship between owner and object, ideally enabling users to keep it for longer and understand it to be less disposable. Alternative materials subvert needless aesthetic conventions for consumer electronics and reduce waste. Their combination opens opportunities for users to negotiate their own experiences through customization.
Participation and Assembly
Standard monitor cases are simultaneously overly anonymous in their presentation and overly complicated in their construction — using highly-manufactured plastic and metal parts and connectors, for a product that has few electronic components and needs little in the way of insulation, cooling, and collision-proofing.
The monitor-as-kit could include a small handful of parts, plus fasteners, for the display casing itself:
- Front façade/panel
- Backlit LCD, fastened to the inside of the front panel
- Connections module, providing external power and display ports to the monitor’s chipset
- Back enclosure (enclosing electronics and providing connections to stands and mounts)
Each piece is easy to identify and connect, and invests in the user an immediate intimacy towards its functionality. These simple pieces might even be attached with basic joinery or knobs that can be created out of sustainable rigid materials. These could then interact with stands and mounts adhering to the same standards of assembly and material, or existing ones that the user can get their hands on (e.g., VESA-compatible).
User Relationship and Emotional Engagement
Through the assembly of the kit, the user earns a much clearer perception of what is in a monitor and how it works — how best to repair and replace the device and its parts. The one-time snapping together components, twisting knobs, fitting joints, and connecting cables re-frames a user’s relationship from one with a disposable and monolithic accessory, to one with a dynamic and adaptable product that shows it warrants the user’s consideration.
There Are Better Materials. Let’s Use Them
Broader Impact
The assembly would also bypass the need for advanced unibody manufacturing, welding, chemical sealants and adherents. Most consumer monitors have durable plastic or metal cases in a product that typically endures little physical stress throughout its lifetime and requires few of the insulating properties of advanced plastics. Instead, the case just as effectively could be constructed with simple laser-cut or mold-injected wood, wood composite, and bio-polymers, and be held together largely, if not entirely, with sustainably replaceable fasteners. Depending on consumer response, other materials such as upcycled agricultural waste and cork could be explored.⁴ These aspects also allow services that could sustainably customize, tweak, and repair monitors for users when expert input is helpful or necessary.
Interpretation
The switch to different materials would not only allow consumers to reinterpret the product in their space and values, but immediately recognize it as a departure from the intentionally emotionally-distant designs that dominate the current market, and instead something approachable, growable, and ad hoc. Just by using imperfect or recycled materials, the object signals to the user that they are free to play with it and shape it, without ruining some space-age plastic veneer.
Personalization
While the initial construction of the kit imbues some missing personal connection in a user’s interaction with the monitor, the pieces of that construction afford a customization and personalization process that invites users to live and work with it for longer, even if it becomes a sort of Monitor of Theseus. Easy disassembly affords repair and modular customization and upgrades. These permit users to intimately participate in an object usually accessible only by experts, factory refurbishers, or trash heap salvagers. New features, such as a corkboard front panel for note-keeping, or a new touchscreen panel, can be added to the same device without tossing the whole thing (and, importantly, with keeping the core that a user may have come to treasure).
Reflections
Footnotes
[1] The U.S. installed base of monitors was over 100 million units as of 2017 https://www.statista.com/statistics/217264/installed-base-of-portable-computers-in-the-us-by-device-type/
[2] https://uxdesign.cc/the-covid-driven-comeback-of-the-desktop-computer-acac45cc7ecf
https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/blog/2020/its-time-for-home-productivity-to-shine/
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/virtuality-continues-esports-market-gets-133724671.html
https://www.dezeen.com/2018/08/09/campana-brothers-cork-furniture-sobreiro-collection-design/
Other Sources
Assembly References
https://www.behance.net/gallery/110110589/NOMAD-portable-stool
https://wilsonbrothers.co.uk/work/chairfix/
Alternative Materials Images and Background
https://buildabroad.org/2017/02/22/wood-composite/
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-injection-molding-wood-powder-sustainable-fabrication.html
https://titoma.com/blog/sustainable-packaging-electronics-manufacturing
https://www.designboom.com/design/aotta-sound-absorbing-hemp-husks-panels-10-01-2018/
https://www.dezeen.com/2018/08/09/campana-brothers-cork-furniture-sobreiro-collection-design/
LCD Panel Images
Jim Nature TV Images
http://www.artnet.com/artists/philippe-starck/jim-nature-tv-set-UKUpkiCq9790b-eFCI0lNQ2
https://www.bukowskis.com/en/lots/580864-tv-jim-nature-philippe-starck-saba
https://www.vntg.com/103841/jim-nature-portable-colour-tv-by-philippe-starck-for-saba/
