Research area / Engineering & Design
Engineering
& Design
Designing for Persistence Across Generations
Central question
What would it take for the things we build to be maintained, repaired and improved across generations?
01 / Premise
Right to Repair & Longevity: Archaeological Lessons for Modern Engineering
Archaeology teaches a profound lesson: technologies that persist across centuries share common design principles. Hand axes remained functionally similar for 1.5 million years not because innovation ceased, but because the design was fundamentally sound—repairable with available materials, adaptable to local conditions, learnable through observable motion patterns.
Modern engineering has inverted this principle. Planned obsolescence, proprietary interfaces, and non-repairable components create a throwaway culture incompatible with both environmental sustainability and technological advancement. A civilization that cannot maintain its infrastructure cannot advance.
02 / Repair
Right to Repair
Right to Repair is not merely consumer advocacy—it is a prerequisite for technological persistence. Systems must be:
01
Understandable by independent technicians
02
Repairable with available tools and materials
03
Upgradeable rather than disposable
04
Documented in accessible formats
Longevity over obsolescence means designing products that improve with age through accumulated experience and incremental upgrades, not forcing replacement cycles through artificial limitations.
03 / Policy
EU Policy Alignment: Circular Economy & Extended Producer Responsibility
European Union policy increasingly recognizes these principles:
EU policy
Circular Economy Action Plan
Designing products for durability, reuse, and repair
EU policy
Right to Repair Directive
Mandating availability of spare parts and repair documentation
EU policy
Ecodesign Requirements
Energy efficiency and material efficiency standards
EU policy
Extended Producer Responsibility
Manufacturers responsible for full product lifecycle
These policies create regulatory frameworks where longevity-focused engineering becomes economically viable. Our work demonstrates practical implementations that exceed compliance while proving commercial viability.
04 / Robotics
Universal Robotic Design: The Only Path to Advanced Technological Society
Current infrastructure design assumes human maintenance. This creates fundamental scalability limits:
- Critical systems require 24/7 human monitoring
- Dangerous environments risk human life for routine maintenance
- Specialized knowledge creates bottlenecks as systems proliferate
- Inconsistent interfaces multiply training requirements exponentially
Universal Design principles made public spaces accessible to people with diverse abilities. Universal Robotic Design extends this: infrastructure should be inherently maintainable by autonomous robotic systems while simultaneously improving human accessibility.
This is not a convenience—it is a necessity. As technological complexity increases, human-only maintenance becomes impossible. We face a choice:
Path 1: Increasing fragility
Systems become unmaintainable as complexity exceeds human cognitive capacity, leading to cascading failures and technological regression.
Path 2: Universal Robotic Design
Infrastructure designed from inception for robotic maintenance, creating resilient, self-maintaining systems that free humans for higher-level problem solving.
05 / Principles
Core Principles
01
Multi-Modal Sensing Support
Navigation and diagnostic information accessible to diverse robotic sensor arrays (visual, thermal, electromagnetic, acoustic), not just human vision.
02
Dimensional Flexibility
Physical spaces and mounting points accommodate varied robotic form factors (wheeled, tracked, flying, climbing), not just human reach and strength.
03
Standardized Interfaces
Predictable, machine-readable interactions across equipment types, enabling autonomous operation without device-specific programming.
04
Electromagnetic Accessibility
Critical functions remain accessible despite interference, with redundant communication methods and graceful degradation.
05
Self-Description Capability
Equipment broadcasts its own maintenance requirements, interface specifications, and status in standardized formats.
These principles don’t just enable robotic maintenance—they create clearer, more logical systems that benefit human technicians through reduced cognitive load, better documentation, and safer working conditions.
06 / Writing
The Astromech Droids series
Teaching an Old Droid New Tricks: Why I’m Building an R2-D2 inspired ‘droid
Or: How Star Wars Reveals Everything Wrong With Modern Technology Part 1 of a series on astromech droids, universal design, and the technologies we’ve…
The Death of the Helper Droid: How Modular Design Philosophy Gave Way to Vendor Lock-in
A History of Lost Technologies and Changed Incentives Part 2 of the R2 Astromech Project series In the first post, I explained why I’m…
Universal Maintenance Design: Making Infrastructure R2-Accessible
How Designing for Robots Creates Better Systems for Everyone Part 3 of the R2 Astromech Project series In the previous posts, I explained why…
07 / Connections