Finishing in first place in the Core77 Design for (Your) Product Lifetime Competition sponsored by Autodesk and iFixit was the LCD Easy Access Monitor Project. The project was greatly appreciated by the judges for its clear use case, concept communication, and most importantly, the use of a functioning physical prototype. The comparison in repair time between a traditional monitor and the redesigned easy access was both obvious and striking in the team’s video comparison.
Autodesk Software Used:
The design of the Easy Access Monitor took advantage of many excellent concepts that can be found in our Design for Repair and Upgrade Video. Using these ideas the team was able to create a functioning monitor that can be disassembled without the need for any tools at all. This ease of disassembly, along with the high visibility of the parts that allow it, encourage users to fix their products themselves, even if they have never done so before.
The feelings of the judges were probably best summed up by Dan Lockton, researcher and creator of the Design with Intent Toolkit. "The Easy Access LCD Monitor offers a cost benefit to users as well as an environmental benefit in terms of reducing the number of whole monitors which are thrown away rather than repaired. The adoption of a disassembly method as described in this entry could have a significant impact on consumers' repair behaviour with monitors, and potentially laptops too. In increasing users' confidence in repairing their own products, it could also have further benefits as time goes on."
With this in mind, let’s hope that designs like this will be adopted by the major monitor manufacturers and come into the mainstream.
You can learn more about the team’s Easy Access Monitor project by downloading their writeup below. [PDF]
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
 Easy Access Monitor Writeup | 1.32 MB |
