Explore - Who's doing it well?

Fairphone

Fairphone is the world’s first repairable smartphone. Founder Bas van Abel and his team worked to understand where the materials involved in the production of a smartphone come from as well as learn about the labour that created them.

When exploring the smartphone landscape, they discovered a persistent underlying belief in the tech industry: the goal is always to sell more phones. To tackle this mental model, their mission was to shift the industry to design products that can be easily disassembled and repaired. They also designed an alternative business model – based on subscription –to incentivise re-use. To further shift the system, they wrote to European policymakers, influencing a change in the law that has made it a requirement for other smartphone providers to make their products repairable.

Source: Shared by Bas van Abel at Design for Planet Festival ’24 (Design Council Medium Blog)

Image credit: Fairphone