The Product Lifecycle

When you buy a product, how long do you expect it to last? How will it eventually reach the end of its useful life? And what will happen to it when the end inevitably comes?

When I started brainstorming for ODH Design, I knew that I wanted to create products that would work reliably for at least a century. I set that benchmark because after 100 years a product’s value will increase. Time has a weight to it that people value; evidence of this can be found in today’s demand for classic cars, old vinyl records, and antique furniture. People will value the product for the first century based on its own merits and function in their lives, but eventually something will break and need repair. Once the first century is surpassed, they’ll almost certainly spend the time or money to repair their product so that it will last another 100 years.

Will we still be flipping steaks on the barbecue in 100 years? Will there be an invention that replaces the table? It sounds like a ridiculous question and it’s true that something as foundational as a table is unlikely to become obsolete but we can’t tell the future. Peering through history tells us that our tools evolve as human life evolves. Thinking about the product lifecycle isn’t only about making something that’s reliable, it’s also about making something that can easily be restructured for its next purpose. I love working with metals especially for this reason. Abundant metals like steel can be easily and profitably melted down and turned into new products - hopefully products that have been designed with the full product lifecycle in mind. I also try to make things that can be easily disassembled, or create entire products from a single material. For instance any of our stainless steel home goods would be easily recognized by a recycler as 304 grade stainless steel. These products can be thrown right into a melting furnace and turned back into raw material. The same goes for any of our steel tables or The Crucible. The Garlic Press has a wooden base which can be easily separated from the stainless steel peg board. The Garlic Press and peg board can be recycled, while the wooden base will quickly decompose when left in the elements. I’ve been working on some lighting designs recently which will make this endeavor more difficult. I’ll have to use materials such as insulated wire for obvious reasons. But even with products of higher complexity, if the design of the chassis is truly special someone will find value in replacing the “guts” in order to keep the product relevant and in good working order for centuries to come.

Another thing that matters is the design itself. Are there elements to the design that are clever, intentional, and elegant? Will someone in the future understand and appreciate them? I strive to create designs that are timeless and, leveraging history, I look at past designs and try to distill what it is about them that’s so unique and enables the design to hold its value today. I often find that it has to do with the presence of just the right amount of clever and purposeful detailing. We have a sense when a design is “trying too hard” and is full of attention grabbing details that serve no other purpose. Likewise we can sense when details are purposeful and efficient while still conveying a level of beauty in form. Take the design of the two 19th century stoves below. The one on the right is intricately detailed while the one on the left is kept pretty simple. These are both well designed and well built pieces. I personally find the one on the left far more appealing and I have to ask myself why that is. I find the detailing on the right stove distracting and lacking intention. The stove on the left is sparing in detail but the details that are there are intentional. Like the little nub at the bottom of the feet, the very slight taper to the legs, the way the tong bulges out ever so slightly rather than maintaining perfect tangency. The less you say, the more people listen. One final thing that attracts me to a particular design is novelty. If we see a design everywhere it loses its novelty. Novelty is that thing that makes certain designers stand out for their time period. Neuroscience backs this up - when humans experience novelty, dopamine is released into the brain.

So, what does it look like to design something to function properly for a century? Thanks to the giants upon whose shoulders we stand, this can be done with analytical engineering and accelerated testing. Take the Barbecue Tongs for instance -the omega shaped tong spring along with the hinge mechanism were both designed for high cycle life. Steel components that see a high enough stress (get flexed) for enough cycles will eventually fail by a mode called fatigue. A fatigue failure can happen when the amount of stress isn’t enough to permanently deform the part but is enough to propagate a surface crack that eventually finds its way through the thickness of the part. Steel parts can be designed for infinite life if the stress is maintained below a particular stress level known as the endurance limit. You’ve seen fatigue in action if you’ve ever bent the tab on a soda can back and forth until it breaks off. To put this on a macro scale, imagine trying to tear a piece off of a stale baguette. You would first crank it one direction to put the surface under tension and initiate a crack in the hard outer layer. Then you might push the other way and do the same on the other side. You crank back and forth and each time the bread inside tears a little bit further until eventually it’s weak enough to break apart completely. The same thing happens in metals, although the amount of deflection can be so low that we often don’t even perceive it happening until there’s a catastrophic failure. If you look at the fracture surface under a microscope you can actually determine the number of cycles to failure by counting the number of individual striations (tear lines) that you see.

Fatigue related fracture surface striations

Returning to the tongs, some assumptions had to be made about the typical user in order to estimate the number of cycles that should be anticipated. I started paying attention at backyard barbecues and did a little bit of research online to try to get a sense for what the typical use case looked like. It seemed reasonable to assume that the typical user would likely be an adult cooking for family and friends who probably does not barbecue more than one weekend day per week. During a single barbecue session, let’s assume they make 20 sausages that need to be flipped and then removed from the barbecue at the end - that’s 40 full open and close cycles per barbecue session. Let’s double that number because we know that the barbecue master is over there clamping the tongs back and forth to kill time while waiting for the meat to cook. There are 5,200 weeks in a century. We can multiply that by 80 cycles per week to get 416,000 cycles in the design lifespan of the product. This gives us a rough idea of the number of cycles that we should account for, but to be a little bit more conservative let’s double that number and round up to a nice round number - say 1,000,000 cycles. When designing steel parts I typically try to design for infinite life. This means confirming that the stress will remain below the endurance limit. I found a solution after iterating through different shapes, thicknesses, and materials - the final design was made from 301 fully work hardened stainless steel (hardening the material increases strength and fatigue resistance). At this point the product should not fail, in theory. But theory is just theory until proven. To prove out the design, I turned a milling machine into a cycle tester. The mill cycled the tongs opened and closed at a constant cadence. By counting the number of cycles per minute, I was able to extrapolate and determine how much time was required to hit 1,000,000 cycles. This test proved out the reliability of both the hinge mechanism and the spring.

Alright, alright enough of the boring engineering stuff. But this really is the goal with all of my products; I strive to design them with an eye towards longevity but also end of life. They should remain relevant and reliable for a century and they should be made from materials that can be easily and profitably recycled. If an ODH product ever breaks (assuming you didn’t throw it out of your car window at highway speeds) I see it as my responsibility to repair it. This policy keeps me honest - if I ever find that this policy invalidates my business model, that’s feedback that I’m not successfully designing products with the full lifecycle in mind and I need to do better.

Thanks for reading and if you have any feedback about what you found interesting, what you found not so interesting, and what you want to hear more about please let me know. I’d love to hear from you.

-ODH