Justin Dunham

's journal about making things

Making things maker-friendly

Filed under: Everything Else — Tags: , , , , — Justin Dunham on October 16, 2011

A possible "maker-friendly" badge, public domain. A link to the .svg is at the end of this post.

In Mark Frauenfelder’s Made by Hand, he talks about modifying his coffee machine (among other projects). He’s able to do this because the coffee machine happens to be easy to repair as a byproduct of its commercial construction.

Think about your microwave or mobile phone, on the other hand. How easy would they be to repair, if you needed to? Very difficult – in fact, stickers on many appliances note that there are “no user-serviceable parts inside”. If you have an iPhone, you’ll notice that it uses special, rare screws that it’s difficult to find a screwdriver for. Even the battery is encased within the phone and impossible to replace without serious intervention.

Why things are hard to take apart

There are some legitimate reasons for this. Microwaves, for example, probably discourage users from fiddling around with them for product liability reasons – if a user tries to repair their microwave and injures themselves, a small appliance manufacturer wants to be able to say that they told you not to mess with it. For the iPhone, there may be some good reasons having to do with branding – Apple has made its name by creating magical devices that users don’t have to intimately understand to use. Apple products are known as tools, not machines.

But there are also lots of reasons why you should be able to take apart, and perhaps then modify, the things you buy.

  • The first question for me is one of ownership. One of the things that bothers people about software license agreements is that companies argue you are just buying a license to the software, not a copy of it. From a business perspective, this would ideally mean that you can’t sell software when you’re done with it - an outcome that some software companies have managed to achieve. By making a product impossible for an average consumer to open, you’re effectively placing some of the same restrictions on purchasers of that product – though of course they can resell it and do other things you may not like, they are at least somewhat restricted in the way they can use it. Do they really “own” the product, then?
  • Secondly, making it hard for people to take apart the products they own creates tremendous waste (some of that, of course, is intentional). The story of maker Mister Jalopy is that a 20-cent part in his car broke, and it cost him $500 to replace it. Why? Because that part is attached to a subassembly, which is only sold with another assembly. So you have to buy the whole assembly again to make the repair, a waste of money for Mister Jalopy, and a waste of a bunch of extra components. We probably run into this ourselves from time to time without even realizing it. If you could get into your stuff more easily, you could repair it yourself, or get a knowledgeable amateur to take care of it for you, at a fraction of the price of the alternatives.
  • Finally, I think maker-unfriendliness impairs innovation and education. Some of the components in cheap stuff you own – your $100 laser printer, for example – are very high-quality and eminently re-usable in various technology products. But it’s hard (for me, anyway) to take my old HP Deskjet apart, so it’s just a magic box that’ll go to the landfill when some part of it dies. If I could easily disassemble it, I (or my hypothetical kids) might learn something about how it works. If I gave it to a local hackerspace or tinkerer, they might be able to do something useful with the stuff inside.

Maker-friendly

In volume 3 of MAKE Magazine, Dale Dougherty talked about (coined?) the term “maker-friendly”. “Maker-friendly” products are ones that can be disassembled with relatively little effort. Their construction is easy to understand, and therefore possible to modify. (For “maker”, you could also read “hacker” here, for the correct meanings of “hacker” – “hacker-friendly”).

In the next volume, MAKE published a Maker’s Bill of Rights, which you can see here. I’ll select a few that are most interesting to me; there are 17 rights proposed at the link.

  • Cases shall be easy to open.
  • Profiting by selling expensive special tools is wrong and not making special tools available is even worse.
  • Docs and drivers shall have permalinks and shall reside for all perpetuity at archive.org.
  • Ease of repair shall be a design ideal, not an afterthought.

The idea of “profiting by selling expensive special tools” is interesting. I guess I wonder with maker-friendliness – why do manufacturers want to do this? Right now the consumer pays twice: once upfront for the actual product, and then, on average, a little extra when they need it repaired. Will consumers pay extra upfront for “maker-friendly” designs where, for example, HP doesn’t make money off proprietary power adapters?

The fourth bullet, the idea of ease of repair as a design ideal, is a possible counter to this. If things are easy to repair, perhaps they are easier or cheaper to manufacture?  Or perhaps they have a higher value on the secondary market, and therefore are slightly more valuable upfront? On the other hand, is maker-friendliness in contradiction to the idea of user-friendliness (ease of use and operation)?

There is also a branding component to this. I wonder if maker-friendliness, or some variant or related theme, could be to technology what organic growing methods are to food. Would you pay a bit extra for something that you knew you really owned and could take apart easily, even if perhaps the benefits weren’t totally apparent right away?

Maker-friendliness seal

I thought it would be interesting to think about how you can designate maker-friendliness in a product in a way that’s easily discernible to consumers, so I came up with this seal (which I obviously am releasing to the public domain – it is based on some of the work at openclipart.org). Here is the .svg. I put my name on it, but obviously you can remove that, make whatever modifications you’d like (or not!), and promulgate it.

Is “maker-friendliness” something you’d pay extra for, either as an actual feature or as something you generally support but may or may not use? Is this something consumers at large might care about yet, or ever?

We are our own novels

Filed under: Everything Else — Tags: , , — Justin Dunham on

The presidential primary process is instructive, isn’t it? There’s a grueling, multi-year game during which a few people, usually a mixture of knowns and unknowns, become serious candidates for President. They debate endlessly and their actions are constantly scrutinized by a significant percentage of the American public (and perhaps the world). Candidates unpredictably lose and gain stature based on verbal missteps, things they may have done a very long time ago, things they are accused of but may not have actually done, changes in world events over which they have no control, etc.

I don’t have to name any names because this happens in every election, to candidates of both parties. (Countries with parliamentary systems seem from the outside to be a little less vulnerable to this form of selection, but I digress.) Think about what you really know about a major-party candidate – probably very little. And on the other hand, think about how much predictive power a misplaced comment or bad photo is likely to have once this person is elected. Very little, I’d imagine.

And yet pundits spend countless amounts of energy, time, and money putting together these little incidents into stories, because people believe they have validity and are a legitimate factor in deciding who to vote for.

In my own life, I’ve noticed I do this a lot. It doesn’t take much for me to decide that I like a certain person, or that conversely that I would never get along with them, perhaps just one brief exchange. I do this when thinking about my own life, too – I take lots of different events and incidents from my life, some of them very small, and I put them together into a judgment about myself. Yes, I skipped class again today. And I remember the time I took the elevator at my school (which students weren’t allowed to do) when I was in fourth grade. I can think of a few more incidents like that. I’ve always enjoyed flouting authority.

I fit the larger events of my life (the schools I went to, my family situation, my marriage) into those narratives and try to construct a story arc for myself, which might change from day to day. It’s a problem. As a way of informing future action, it’s sort of like choosing what type of car to buy based solely on the color of the paint – the decision is based on heavily oversimplified, and often irrelevant, data. And it’s possible to avoid making these judgments altogether, or at least treat them with less seriousness.

Another way to talk about narrative is to talk about “framing”. Say you get rejected for a job you’re interested in. One way to frame it is to say that it’s a sign the job wasn’t right for you after all. Another is to say it’s a setback from which it’ll take time to recover. A third would be to say that it’s the end of your dreams to do x. There are many fact patterns for which all 3 of these interpretations would be valid. As much as one might like to think this is definitely the way things are, you can actually choose how to interpret things.

It’s sort of like reading a novel. In ninth grade, I remember one of my fellow students asking our teacher whether any interpretation of a novel was defensible, since you couldn’t prove, say, that Holden Caulfield didn’t symbolize Santa Claus. My teacher responded that while you might not be able to prove it, some interpretations were definitely more defensible than others. But it’s a choice based on the evidence; there isn’t a clear answer.

Are avocadoes “vegan eggs”?

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , , , , , , — Justin Dunham on October 15, 2011

Blackbird eggs. By Wikimedia Commons contributor Lokilech (picture links to page)

In this post I noted that I found some strange similarities between avocados and eggs. Avocados can be subsituted for eggs in some recipes (especially when not much egg is called for); they seize up and get rubbery just like eggs when they’re overcooked.

I also note, not that it’s relevant, that they’re constructed very similarly. Think about the inside of each – an embryo and its food source, suspended within the fruit by some other filling (egg white or avocado flesh). The possibility that avocados are some kind of “vegan egg” makes it tempting to draw as many parallels as possible.

So, I did a fair amount of research to try to understand whether avocados and eggs are really similar, chemically or in any other way. The answer, I’m afraid, is “not really”.

Baking

Avocados can do some neat baking tricks. You can make frosting, or substitute avocado for much of the butter in a brioche. The use of avocados in baking was the first thing that made me wonder if they have egg-like properties.

It is also true that avocados can substitute for eggs in baking occasionally, but generally only for a small amount of eggs – just one or 2. In this case, it’s also the fat that the avocado is taking the place of.

More generally, it turns out that in recipes like these, avocado is almost always substituting for butter, in order to add the fat that makes baked goods more tender and moist. This is a very similar technique to simply adding fruit puree, such as a blended banana, or applesauce, as a substitute. The difference with avocados is that they’re uniquely fatty – which is part of what makes them extra-delicious. As a result, they contribute more of what butter does than a banana or apple would. Just to be clear, however, it’s not really comparable. Butter is about 80% fat by weight, avocados 15%, and bananas less than 1%.

Emulsions

The other thing I wondered about avocados is whether they might be like eggs because they form emulsions. Before I go any further, let me explain what an emulsion is.

Normally, when you try to mix oil and vinegar together, or oil and water, you can’t. No matter how hard you agitate the mixture, all the little oil blobs inevitably find each other and then link up into one giant blob. There are lots of exceptions to this, however – mayonnaise, for example, contains water components (such as lemon juice and vinegar) and also lots of oil. And yet the mixture doesn’t separate.

This state is called an emulsion, and it’s brought about by emulsifers. Emulsifers are long molecules with one side that likes water and dissolves readily in it, and another side that likes oil and dissolves readily in it. When the molecule is simultaneously dissolved at both ends, oil and water molecules are linked together. One emulsifier you know is soap, which helps water remove grease from your hands. Another is the crema you sometimes get on good espresso, which is apparently an emulsion of coffee oils with water. Yum!

What keeps mayonnaise (our original example) from falling apart is a very common food emulsifier called lecithin. The readiest source of lecithin in a kitchen is the egg yolk, hence lecithin’s name from Greek lekithos (λέκιθος), “egg yolk”. The lecithin molecules from the yolk dissolve in the oil and water-based ingredients in mayonnaise, binding them together so the sauce is stable. There are lots of other emulsifiers too, including mustard, and there are even other common sources of lecithin, such as soy. But generally it’s egg yolks that play this role in the kitchen.

What does this have to do with avocados? If avocados are anything like eggs, you would expect them to have some emulsifying powers, like eggs. I think what made me suspect this was this Alton Brown recipe, in which he uses avocados instead of eggs to make ice cream. Eggs play a critical role in ice cream, which is to emulsify the fat and water present in the ingredients. How can you do away with them unless avocados also play this role?

It turns out that the fat in avocados is already emulsified within the fruit. This is the reason you can handle avocado flesh without getting your hands greasy. So, as far as I can tell, what you’re doing by adding avocado to ice cream is a little like adding butter (but much tastier and less weird), which shouldn’t really be a problem. And indeed, it turns out that avocados are a pretty weak emulsifer of anything else. You certainly can’t make mayonnaise with ‘em.

Conclusion

There are lots of other wonderful and delicious things you can do with eggs, too, like whipping them into a foam to make meringues, or making a delicious zabaglione or souffle. These are also things that avocados can’t do, though you may be able to find other egg substitutes for these contexts.

So, even though they look similar (at least to me), and poetically I would sort of like the avocado to be a vegan egg, it isn’t.

Creative Commons License
.