The big thing these days seems to be electronic innovation with new and ever more useful "technical objects". The coolest addition to the panoply of gadgets is the iphone. It has an amazing interface and its method of operation is incredible. When a technical object functions that well it's easy to say, "Well, of course that's how it should be done. It's just so obvious!" Apparently not so obvious, since it took a lot of years to get a cell phone to that level of functionality. Yet, repair is the one thing where most of these objects fail miserably. In the old days, if you broke your plow, the damage could be observed and the fix could be made with a quick walk to the barn - as long as you had the right materials and tools needed for the repair. And any good farmer worth his salt did. Today, the cell phone, ipod, computer, DVD player and other devices are sent away for a specialist to work on. His materials, tools and knowledge are not had by many who own a modern technical object. It just seems that the technical transparency for repairs of almost any appliance or electronic device is a missing part of these objects. Maybe, that's because it's cheaper to throw it away than fix it. Still, for the expensive items it would be nice if they had some type of self-diagnostic screen that would tell the user its current state, problem or module in question. This would allow the user to make an educated guess about repairing or discarding the object rather than taking it to a repair center and waiting a week for an estimate. The repair part would be a block or module that simply replaces the faulty part. Designers could make the parts likely to fail the ones that can easily be replaced. This problem shows up on the mega-million ipods that have worn out batteries or bad hard drives. They should be designed for repair by consumers not just specialists.
