What is it about?
Does Design for Repair matter for Battery Life? In smartphones closed product designs have come under attack for fabricating a link between battery life and the life span of the smartphone. A German iPhone brand community and the transnational Fairphone brand community were explored with regard to the troubles they experienced with their batteries. The paper gives insights into which engagements are transported in peer-to-peer problem solving communities with regard to battery practices. Battery narratives reported by online brand community members were investigated through netnographic procedures. The results of the descriptive inference indicate that sustainability-oriented interactions in brand communities vary. The engagements towards energy saving are more wide spread in the iPhone community than in the Fairphone community.
Featured Image
Photo by Kamil Switalski on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Given that the Fairphone brand community has plenty of sustainability-oriented users, one might have expected that they would Champion Energy saving. We found that iPhone users support this behaviour through giving more advice. For open product designs like the Fairphone battery management was not a great pain point.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a great pleasure as it was my first publication in Business Informatics and it has co-authors who continue to excel in data science applications.
Frithiof Svenson
Carl von Ossietzky Universitat Oldenburg
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: MKWI 2018 vom 6. bis 9. März „Data driven X — Turning Data into Value“, Wirtschaftsinformatik & Management, December 2017, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s35764-017-0134-y.
You can read the full text:
Resources
smartphone crises and adjustments
This is the story of the Fairphone online brand community
Advent of Practice Theories in Research on Sustainable Consumption: Past, Current and Future Directions of the Field
Takes stock of social practice Theory approaches to consumption
Roskladka, N., Bressanelli, G., Saccani, N., & Miragliotta, G. (2025). Repairable electronic products for the circular economy: a review of design for repair features, practices and measures to contrast obsolescence. Discover Sustainability, 6(1), 66.
The current linear economy, with its “take-make-dispose” approach, has led to an unprecedented level of waste generation related to the end-of-life of electronics products, entailing huge impacts on climate change, pollution and resource depletion. Against this trend, product repairability is a preferred Circular Economy strategy to extend product lifespan and contrast obsolescence. It is strongly advocated by consumer movements (“Right to Repair”) and supported by environmental policies, such as the European Union Circular Economy Action Plan. To be effective, a repairability strategy has to be defined at the product design stage. However, many electronics products are still designed with built-in obsolescence.
Repair practices in a virtual smartphone community: Fostering more sustainable usage through branding
Over the past decades, consumer culture has turned the mobile phone into a market place icon. Despite consumers' fondness for the functionalities of these devices, mobile phones come at a considerable social cost, leaving ethical and environmental footprints. This article discusses repair and maintenance practices of smartphones as outcomes of constitutive contexts that ethical brands may provide. The objective is to provide a better explanation for the emergence of such practices around organizations. Social practice theory approaches to consumption often consider teleo-affective structures or engagements to be the key to transform bundles of practices and material arrangements of which the built environment consists. The article traces the affects that branding transports as consumers appropriate their phones e.g. through performances of tinkering and fixing. Inspired by a Consumer Culture Theory reading of social practices this article conceptualizes brands as an organizational vehicle needed to transport affects. Seen as cultural systems, brands carry the potential to leverage affects towards repair and maintenance practices. This investigation focuses on the role that ethical branding can play in the creation of public encounters with concepts, practices and embodiments of sustainability. The findings from a netnography of a brand community highlight how brands persuade consumers to introduce by-standers to repair and maintenance practices of smartphones. This article claims that leveraging consumer engagement through ethical branding is a practical and effective way to promote sustainability. Brand sustainability imperatives translate into cultural conversations and political processes that help to imaginatively examine and re-configure the intersectional challenges of sustainability.
sustainable development, re-examing the interdependencies between information and communication technology (ICT), human behavior, and our environment
Against the backdrop of sustainable development, science is increasingly called upon to re-examine the interdependencies between information and communication technology (ICT), human behavior, and our environment. The goal is to involve various stakeholders (companies, consumers, and politicians) in an integrative manner in the design of more sustainable products, services, business models, and legal frameworks. In a preparatory step, the concrete expectations and attitudes of the stakeholders are collected, both psychologically at the individual level and ethnographically at the interest group level. Building on this, business and political measures are developed that enable the integration of external stakeholders into innovation processes, such as advisory boards, participatory product development, repair cafés, government incentive systems, and initiatives for legislative proposals. The division of labor among the professorships participating in the project is based on their content-related and methodological focuses. Research questions are pursued from different perspectives, thus bringing together consumer, market, political, and stakeholder perspectives. The research disciplines (business informatics, environmental informatics, social sciences, psychology, marketing, innovation research, and sustainability science) not only participate intradisciplinarily, but also collaborate on joint work packages from different perspectives based on their expertise. The synergies exploited expand the focus of individual questions beyond disciplinary boundaries, thus contributing to high research quality and greater transparency. Throughout the project, political, social, and business stakeholders, as well as the existing networks of the participating professorships and universities (e.g., the Technology Contact Point at the University of Osnabrück, CENTOS Oldenburg, the ICT network Osnabrück, the ERTEMIS network, the Lüneburg Innovation Incubator, and the B.A.U.M. membership), will be involved. New contacts will also be established through the workshop series "Innovation Network for Sustainable Smartphones (INaS)," which is based on open discourse (open innovation) with industry partners.
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
