Solarpunk artwork often features sleek, futuristic technology – sometimes because it contrasts well with nature in outdoor scenes, or because the smooth shapes compliment it and reject the techno aesthetics often found in cyberpunk and real life. But do those aesthetics match with the DIY, Open Source, Copyleft, Right-to-Repair activist side of the solarpunk movement? What would tech, appliances, etc look like in a society that prioritizes resilient, long-lasting, repairable stuff?
Some of the language in this page will be a bit generic as it tries to cover everything from computers and washing machines to bicycles to pots and pans. As with all of these resources it's a work in progress and I'm happy to add more links, dedicated sections, and specific examples if you have something you think fits!
I think in order to talk about how stuff might be made differently, it’s worthwhile to talk about the goals and incentives that structure what gets made today, how it gets made, and how different those goals and incentives might be in a solarpunk society.
I think there’s two broad categories to look at: the first is the goals and culture of the industry/engineers/designers/company owners responsible for what gets made, the second is the mindset, expectations, and needs of the people who buy and use the products.
In our present day, at least in wealthier nations, much of how we interact with stuff is through a siloed system of extraction → manufacture → purchase → use → and disposal. The companies that produce a thing generally don’t care what happens to it once it’s sold. Their only interest is in producing and selling things, and in making a bigger profit than last quarter. They’re not responsible for the long-term, societal and environmental costs of their product, or for what happens to it after it breaks down.
Instead the rest of our society has stepped up - and subsidized them, in a way - by providing an elaborate system of waste management which whisks these unwanted things away out of sight, keeping the whole purchase → disposal system convenient. The person who buys a short-lived appliance might find their frustration at a bad product compounded by dump fees, but they can at least know that it will be hauled away from them and they won’t have to figure out what to do with it, or else see it every day. And so it is for all other stuff, from tech to appliances to furniture to the eternal packaging it all comes in.
And this is a huge part of the responsibilities of local governments, to the point that in some small towns, maintaining roads and operating some kind of dump or transfer station are almost their only real responsibilities. Bigger cities have to find suitable locations to store tremendous amounts of garbage, and create the massive lined (and eventually capped) pits which store our waste, operate fleets of trucks to gather and sort it all, and either build and run recycling centers or pay companies that do. It’s a lot of money and labor spent to make sure that buying something and throwing it away are both easy.
And that default feeds back into manufacture – to some extent, things are produced with the expectation, even requirement, that they'll be thrown away. This leads to a lot of clever shortcuts, cost-cutting, and even intentional sabotage under titles like planned obsolescence or the use of sub-par custom parts.
Several people I talked to while looking for examples for this page recommended that I look into household stuff produced in the Soviet Union. So far at least I haven't really found many major differences between them and stuff produced by other countries in the same time period (that doesn't mean they don't have great examples, I'm just having trouble finding stuff and that may come down to the fact that most of my searching is done in English). One thing I did find while following up on that was a report on soviet appliance manufacturing drafted by the CIA in 1962. I think the most interesting thing there was their analysis of the Soviets' goals. They described what they considered to be an ambitious goal at the time: that by 1965 there would be one refrigerator for every five urban households, one washing machine for every three urban households, and one sewing machine for every two households, both urban and rural.
And that struck me as a very different way of looking at the production of goods.
Basically if you're an American appliance company your goal is to make and sell refrigerators. In fact, because your shareholders are looking for growth, your goal is to sell more refrigerators every year, or to sell them at a higher profit each year, or both. You don't care if you're producing more than people need, or what happens to the old ones, as long as this year's model is selling. In fact, if the previous years’ models are too reliable, your business might not be sustainable because you need new sales. You might even start an advertising campaign to try and convince people to replace a working refrigerator with a new one to bring in more money.
If you're the Soviet government, by contrast, it appears your goal was to make enough refrigerators that (eventually) every household had one, then get those factories back to work making industrial equipment, or tanks or whatever. The longer those refrigerators lasted, the fewer factory cycles had to be wasted producing replacements. (They didn’t even build dedicated factories for household goods, in many cases.)
State communism may not have much in common with most solarpunk settings, but this sort of structural/incentives framework might have a bit of overlap, even if the underlying reasons are very different.
Almost by definition, a solarpunk society is going to want to minimize the harm it's causing to the species, habitats, and landscape around it. It's going to want to extract as little material as possible, pollute as little as possible, and to clean up the existing damage wherever possible. Modern manufacturing underpins much of our current quality of life (and many peoples’ actual survival), but it's a messy, damaging, extractive, externality-producing field. There are ways to improve on it but one big sidestep to that problem is to simply produce less.
Without making other changes, producing less generally entails a lower quality of life. But there are a few ways to balance these goals: you can design things to be durable and fixable, and arrange some of the systems of society into a library economy, so that any unwanted item is recovered, cleaned up, and provided to someone else, easing both the need for new production and the burden of long-term storage in dedicated landfills.
A refrigerator company under capitalism has no incentive to sell fewer refrigerators but a solarpunk society might very much want to extract less, dispose of less, or choose to spend its limited resources on other projects. Fewer person hours, raw materials, electricity, all spent making refrigerators might actually sound great to them.
This breaks the siloed pipeline from extraction to disposal and changes the incentives: In a library economy, it should be assumed that stuff will be around for a long, long time, and it’ll be worthwhile to design it to last. Manufacturing might be less speculative, and even less specialized, depending on the local needs and conditions.
New Production:
This might be sounding a bit too state-run or top-down so lets look at other ways this sort of thing might be done. A more anarchist framework might involve open-source hardware designs, circulated freely and available to anyone who needs to make a thing. Picture something like thingiverse.
If someone needs something they might go to their local fabrication workshop and ask them to make the thing (and work out whatever compensation fits your setting). The fab shop might pull down a design - perhaps this is just a highly-rated volunteer design, or, as in Ecotopia, it's been reviewed and approved by some form of government/panel of volunteers. They buy/scavenge the parts and materials and produce a one-off, or a short run of the product to meet local need, then move on to something else. This keeps the manufacturer’s incentives more or less in line with the societal good: their livelihood/existence isn’t dependent on people buying enough of the same thing every year, so they don’t need to convince people to throw out their old one and buy a new one (through advertising, planned obsolescence, or other sabotage). I think this can also be described as a move away from speculative production to a more on-demand system.
We’ll talk in the next sections about how these goods might be made fixable and durable, but if they become unwanted (maybe two people move in together, or someone dies) the item might be passed ad-hoc to someone who needs it, or it might be returned to the library economy – volunteers or employees would collect it, inspect it, clean it up or make repairs, and provide it to someone else. If it’s beyond repair for some reason, it would be stripped for usable parts and the remaining materials recycled. Ideally only a very small portion would end up needing forever-storage in a landfill. This process could take place in a huge, futuristic facility, or tons of small workshops; it all depends on your setting.
Conventional wisdom is that there are some huge downsides to this kind of operation - a general fab shop will be far less efficient at producing any given thing than a dedicated facility. The dedicated equipment/layout, the per-arranged supply lines for parts, the specialization and experience of the workers all play a huge role in producing a quality item as quickly and efficiently as possible.
With each new product, even a skilled fab shop crew will be relearning lessons other teams elsewhere already learned, and they'll burn a lot of time learning how to make each thing, and even just maneuvering it around their workshop. And these efficiency losses aren’t just made in person-hours and minor injuries – this slower, less-specialized work means more electricity spent running tools and lights, parts and materials wasted through accidental damage. All of this may come with an environmental cost (in extraction or pollution) depending on how the larger society creates energy and sources materials.
All that said, it appears that flexible, on-demand fabrication is becoming much more common, and transitioning primarily into this model might be easier than I thought. So if your setting doesn't need huge production runs of each item per year, or can't sustain the long distance shipping necessary to cover a much wider area/demand, then a dedicated operation might not be worthwhile.
The other downside is in wait time/convenience - with speculative manufacturing, items are produced in anticipation of need and they're just waiting on a shelf when you decide you need one. This is great if you need it, but when demand is low, it leads to a lot of brand new items traveling straight from factory to warehouse to landfill without ever being used.
In an on-demand solarpunk society, you might be stuck waiting while someone downloads a design, finds parts, and assembles the thing. This is another place where a library economy shines - instead of an individual showing up at a fab shop to commission a new refrigerator, the workers at an appliance library might notice that they never have enough refrigerators in stock and commission some from the fabricators. Then when an individual needs a refrigerator, they can hopefully just go to the library and get one.
One last place in the production of goods where you might see change is around advertising. A solarpunk society which is committed to minimizing its harms and producing as little as possible while still meeting people's needs might see advertising - pushing products on people - as a form of propaganda which places the greed of the manufacturer over the good of the community and world. Trying to drum up artificial demand or introduce unnecessary 'upgrade' changes could be seen as a sort of environmental crime similar to improperly disposing of waste products.
Most of this page talks about the stuff itself - we gathered lists of fancy materials and the sort of guidelines that product designers, or mechanical or electrical engineers might follow in a solarpunk world to make things more fixable. But there’s another, bigger part that has to be in place or else all this work is just more resources wasted in a landfill.
Without a cultural priority on repair, reuse, and adaptation, without a value system that emphasizes something beyond consumption and disposal, nothing changes. Ultimately, everything after production and delivery is in the hands of the people and the societal systems they use.
And that’s the tricky part. Speaking very broadly about the world today, fixing things isn’t most people’s first choice. It’s not hard to find real life examples of places and times where repair, reuse, and making do are/were the default. Its just that, generally the places and people are poor, and they’re doing it out of necessity rather than preference. You may even know someone who fixed things for years and then stopped once they had the means to buy new - because repair and making do were a (possibly shameful) necessity not a cultural value or something they really wanted.
And I think that’s something worth considering - why people fix things in real life, and what it takes to get them there. It’s easy to find olden-days romanticism around thrift, repairing stuff, making do or doing without, whether you’re in the United States talking about the Depression, or a former soviet block country talking about the USSR. It’s easy to forget that most of the time, we’re talking about hardship, bad times, and poverty.
When I was trying to follow up on early recommendations to look into soviet-produced appliances, I talked with a friend from the region. They made it clear in fairly blunt language that it wasn’t the stuff that was different but the people.
They felt that soviet appliances, machinery, etc were, at best, accidentally fixable for the same reason western stuff from that time period was. The real difference, they said, was that most people didn’t have any choice but to take what they could get and make the best of it. And making the best of it often meant teaching themselves repair by trial and error, dealing with cheap, shoddy designs, dangerous components, and a whole lot of wasted stuff disassembled to get spare parts.
Looking around my own region, and the world at large, it’s not hard to find other examples that match this. And for some solarpunk settings, that might be enough all on its own. If your setting leans post-post-apoclyptic, if your society is on a slow recovery from worse times, this sort of toughness and acceptance of limitations is probably baked right in. It’s easier to rebuild less wastefully when standards have already been lowered by hard times. Just know that offering a future where there's less stuff, stuff with fewer features, and longer waits to get it will be a hard sell to people who are currently comfortable and who define themselves by their luxuries (and this may describe parts of your audience).
But if you’re aiming for a bright green utopian future, or if you want a salvage-heavy solarpunk society where people are thrifty by choice, then you’ll probably want some kind of cultural shift and that means examining why people don't fix things, and what it'd take to get them to start.
So what changes to make this work? Earlier I mentioned moral frameworks that treat wealth (and demonstrations of it) as a virtue and repair as a mark of poverty and thus failure. Hopefully a solarpunk society would flip this dynamic on its head - perhaps buying new stuff, especially unnecessarily, might be seen as wasteful and shameful, while fixing things, even in a messy way, would be an accomplishment that demonstrates competence as an adult or your ability to work with your community to get things done.
One of the big accomplishments of modern day maker and repair movements is that they're making work that used to be seen as a shameful necessity into something positive. Something people choose to do. This encompasses everything from Repair Cafés and Fixit Clinics to the growing popularity of visible mending. Thrift was a virtue for a long time, still is in many places, and may gain significance again with a little help.
A cultural emphasis on making repair and reuse the societal default (and outright disposal rare) could shift this quite a bit, and empower people to fix and repair stuff much more easily. This would include both the design of the items and the larger network of library organizations and facilities that work on them.
And a gentler society, with more emphasis on community, can help a lot when things do break down. A refrigerator failing is a small catastrophe for a household today, which could cost them both the financial price of repair or replacement and disposal, but also their food for the month. Mutual aid and support networks can mitigate these harms if they're in place.
It's worth noting that in contrast to a lot of the current art (and depending on the setting's technology level and available resources), a solarpunk society might look generally shabbier than our modern day. Less broken stuff would be hidden away in landfills or exported to poor places out of sight (a pile of broken appliances is just a source of spares and practice for the real repair after all) and the mix of reduced new production and more emphasis on repair - which, when done by regular people, often stops at ‘good enough’ - would leave more things looking old or half-finished. As all this effort adds up across many people, it can have a real cumulative effect that it takes a while to get used to. This isn't unique to a solarpunk world, there are plenty of places IRL where practical and good enough take priority over making something look polished and 'professional,' but a solarpunk society might be very willing to accept a bit of crooked, janky work if it's focusing its resources on higher-priority goals elsewhere.
And of course, it doesn't have to happen this way - you might also have a high-tech, well-resourced society with an aggressive library economy which scoops up old stuff and whisks it away to repair/reuse facilities, with all kinds of automation and labor-saving robotics mixed in.
| A Note on Anachronism: | |
| A big part of this project is in trying to ferret out specific bits of design and culture which existed IRL for one reason but which could be combined for another. Done right, an environmentally-minded society might be able to weld design constraints (such as single layer boards, big components with lots of space around them, and standardized parts, or a reliance on smaller more local workshops) that only existed due to limitations of their time period, to the modern open source movement and a thriving maker/reuse/repair culture. This doesn't represent a return to a golden age of design so much as a anachronistic picking-and-choosing of good ideas to piece together something new. Which parts the people of your setting pick will depend on your goals and the setting's constraints. |
So let's get into how this long-lasting stuff gets made. There are (very broadly) two ways to do this: design it to not break, and design it to be fixed (durability and repairability). Generally the best examples will strive to do both, but these goals can sometimes conflict and force the designers to choose one or the other:
General Themes
Huge thanks to Alex_Glow for all her help with this section (and others), and for all the hardware folks who answered our questions on Mastodon and BSKY. The following guide is mostly made from consolidating their recommendations.
Electronics run much of our modern world, and Solarpunk is generally distinguished by being both high tech and optimistic so we're going to want to keep some level of electronics in our stories (how high tech your setting is will determine how much of this advice you want to include). Unfortunately, in the present, the electronics are often the part an item that fails first and is hardest to fix or replace. Cheap production or planned obsolescence can combine with dense, custom mystery components to turn an otherwise functional device into a paperweight. In fact, in some cases, as with smart appliances, the electronics seem to be added with the expectation that they will shorten the lifespan of the product. The complexity, lack of documentation, and difficulty (for regular people) of producing replacements make electronics an excellent place for a company to exercise control, slip in some unwanted features, or to shorten the lifespan of a product. Though to be fair, documentation is often the lowest priority for any engineer, and modern appliances often cycle quickly through new designs, so a lack of continuing support even for a fairly recent electronic component might be cost cutting and inertia rather than malice.
A solarpunk society might do things differently. I've pestered some hardware folks to find out how:
Chip Design
For many of us, the small, dense, custom-made Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) in our devices are green or blue mysteries.
From talking with hardware folks online, it sounds like the best way to make electronics more repairable is to:
Some other great resources:
Possible PCB substrate (fiberglass + epoxy) replacement materials:
This section is a little less complete but similarly built out from consolidating input from people who work on cars and appliances. You may notice some overlap with the electronics above:
https://ncph.org/history-at-work/rethinking-the-refrigerator/
Does a toaster actually need a modern microcontroller for its timer or can you get by with a bi-metallic strip controller?
This is one area where even a solarpunk society isn't going to be able to do much with some of the electronics design constraints listed above (short of producing much simpler computers for specific tasks). Even the Comodore64 and IBM PC used double-layer boards and this modern homebrew x86 computer appears to use four layers. In order to produce anything approaching modern computers a certain degree of density is necessary (if only to reduce signal latency) and that means smaller components and layered boards. Repairability here will likely depend more on modular, standardized components (meaning your RAM, Hard Drive, Video Card, etc, wouldn't all be on one board) and ease of access to the internals (standardized fasteners not glue, etc). Open source firmware for the hardware is also very important for its long-term usability.
Modern day computer design includes a fair bit of sabotage against repair/customization - avoiding this stuff would improve the resiliancy of computers tremendously while also costing nothing. This includes
Related to repairability and salvage is the idea of scaling back an older device's capabilities in order to manage potential hardware problems and to shrink the attack surface from software vulnerabilities. For example, flashing out-of-support tablets and phones with a custom ROM, essentially turning unsupported, unsecureable devices into secure, single-purpose touchscreens (perhaps for a radio which doesn't have one) or microcontrollers for other systems (like 3d printers or other CNC Machines). This would make them less generally useful, but would still their service life far beyond what their manufacturer intended, and could keep things like unsupported, unpatchable kernels from providing usable security vulnerabilities.
There's another important trade-off to consider in this design process, which is part of the trend away from repairability: improvements to an appliance's efficiency (whether that's electricity or water used) can add complexity which reduces repairability.
You might need more precise (and thus complex) sensors, or to use lighter (and weaker weaker) materials to lower the power needed to move something. These improvements can reduce a product's lifetime but greatly drop the environmental cost of operating it. Most solarpunk settings are going to want to strike a balance somewhere between fixable and efficient.
The important thing here is thinking about your setting and deciding on which tradeoffs they might accept. Perhaps people in one area have a surplus of energy during the day but shortages of refined metals, electronic components, or skilled labor and would prefer simple, sturdy, fixable stuff even if it's a little less efficient. Perhaps people in another region with constant droughts or frequent shortfalls in their green generation of electricity might need any efficiency boost they can get, even if it means their appliances, electronics, or machinery might be harder to fix.
One way a solarpunk setting might be better off than we are today, is that our push for efficiency helped drive and coincided with a push by the manufacturers to swap out their product lines on much shorter timelines. Partly this was because the efficiency goals were set to tighten gradually over time, meaning the manufacturers could make incremental improvements instead of having to jump from 1980s products right to top-of-the-line efficiency. This was pretty reasonable, but it coincided with the manufacturers looking at smart phones and realizing they'd like it better if you replaced their stuff as regularly as you did your phone, and their attempts to jam various 'smart' features into their devices. Aside from all the privacy, security, and longevity problems with 'smart' devices, this all resulted in much shorter runs of any specific product. In the past, a company might sell basically the same refrigerator or other appliance for a decade or more with very few changes. This meant that even when a part wasn't exactly standard (perhaps it was only produced in-house) there was at least a good supply of it available and good reason for parts companies to make duplicates. Once they shortened the production runs for their appliances down to months or maybe a year or two, it got much harder to find replacements for in-house stuff.
Your solarpunk setting should have access to the designs and efficiency progress the companies have already made, and probably won't have their motives for short-run product lines, so finding one or two designs that meet their requirements for efficiency and repairability, and standardizing on them might alleviate some of the severity of the present day trade-offs.
Economies of scale in mass production allow for the widespread availability of incredibly cheap components, including programmable microcontrollers, and tiny computers. This has lead to some wonderfully advanced stuff in the DIY scene and has made hobbyist electronics available to regular people in a way that they basically never were before. Some absolutely wonderful stuff has come out of that in education and general continuing learning. The flipside of this low-cost availability is a sort of laziness, (similar to what we see on the software side, where whenever the hardware improves, the software bloats) - designers use unnecessarily powerful components to do very simple things because those components are familiar and cheap, leading to odd outcomes where some disposable vapes have enough processing power and memory to run a basic web server. There’s no reason economies of scale can’t still appear in a solarpunk society, but a general focus on reducing waste, extracting less, reducing long-distance shipping, and producing things in ethical conditions may make some of that tech less available or less cheap than it is today. Places with existing heaps of tech (such as e-waste dump sites) may even find it to be a resource they can salvage for trade or use, similar to natural resources today. But if these advanced resources become scarcer, people may use them more sparingly, and may look towards older answers for the simple jobs. Here’s a few interesting bits of tech history that might inspire something:
Also known as Cam Timers, and sometimes called Music Box Timers, these systems use a rotating drum or disk with raised contacts to activate various switches in a preprogrammed sequence. This allows for analogue control over an electrical system (such as traffic lights, washing machines, and automated industrial equipment. Much like the pegs in a music box cylinder flick a length of metal to create the notes, in a drum sequencer, as the drum spins, the pegs run across switches and close an electrical circuit. In some versions a programmer can change or rearrange (reprogram) peg or cam positions. To make them even more effective, some designs allow a certain switched circuit to cut power to the motor turning the drum (such as in a washing machine, you might stop the drum from turning while the machine fills up with water, so you don't have to worry about water pressure and the varying time it'll take to fill up). Using feedback, external time delay, and other sensory circuits, it's actually possible to build an electromechanical state machine using a cam timer. These are common in washing machines, where the cam timer runs in phases, but also stops and waits for external signals such as a fill level sensor, or a water heating temperature sensor.
The benefit of these systems to a solarpunk society is that they’re robust and simple. They offer many of the features of a modern microcontroller-based system, including being programmable. But they can be made from fairly basic materials - the most advanced component is an electric motor and those can be made with 1800s technology if necessary - and they can be heavily overbuilt to last a long time if you don't expect to need to reprogram them.
The downsides are that they're more difficult to program, which likely becomes a significant problem if you're doing it a lot, they're mechanical so they will wear out, and they lack some features like detecting and responding to malfunctions, automatically initiating test cycles, providing error codes, etc.
(From biology, electronics, aesthetics and mechanics) is a style of robotics that primarily uses simple analogue circuits, such as comparators, instead of a microprocessor in order to produce an unusually simple design. While not as flexible as microprocessor based robotics, BEAM robotics can be robust and efficient in performing the task for which it was designed.
Like we said above, it’s worth noting that designing stuff to be fixed and designing it to not break in the first place can go hand in hand, but they can also be conflicting goals, depending on the specific circumstances. I've seen this described as durability vs repairability.
Gluing a smartphone into one irreparable brick can make it more resilient - connections are less likely to come loose when it hits the floor, meaning you skip times when you'd otherwise have to repair it. Or water might not be able to enter the case when you drop it in a lake, so nothing shorts out. These are some huge advantages - especially in a device sold with the expectation that it'll be replaced within a few years because of software problems or simply whims of fashion and product cycles. A modern smartphone has to survive a few years of harsh use, then it's very likely thrown away - and ideally the company gets to sell another one for hundreds of dollars.
Would that be the case in a solarpunk society? Would there be a new phone every year with a constant scramble to pack in new features and upgrades? Would software support be short lived to match that cycle? At what point does slow damage (for example, to a battery) and the need to fix it tip the design priorities towards repairability?
As with all things, there are tradeoffs, and we’d likely see quite a bit of debate and drama around those choices.
One place where durability can be improved is in the materials we make things from:
Our current society expects to produce new items and throw old ones away as a sort of default. Many items are made out of cheap materials specifically because they're not expected to last very long. A library economy which expects all unwanted items to cycle back into use again and again for generations might think about things differently though. I've seen it said that buying a quality product up front is a sort of luxury of the rich that saves them money over time - perhaps a solarpunk society would look at the production of items in much the same way. Can we produce things so well that we don't have to make more of the same thing, year after year, forever? Or at least so we can produce far less?
“Objects that are available in stores seem rather old fashioned. I have seen few Ecotopian-made appliances that would not look pretty primitive on American TV. One excuse I’ve heard is that they are designed for easy repair by users. At any rate they lack the streamlining we’re used to – parts stick out at odd angles, bolts and other fasteners are plainly visible, and sometimes parts are even made of wood. I have, however, observed that Ecotopians do repair their own things. In fact there are no repair shops on the streets. A curious corollary is that guarantees don’t seem to exist at all. People take it for granted that manufactured items will be sturdy, durable, and self-fixable – which of course means they are also relatively unsophisticated compared to ours. This state of affairs has not been achieved easily; I have heard many funny stories about ridiculous designs produced in the early days, lawsuits against their manufacturers, and other tribulations. One law now in effect requires that pilot models of new devices must be given to a public panel of ten ordinary people (‘consumers’ is not a term used in polite conversation here). Only if they all find they can fix likely breakdowns with ordinary tools is manufacture permitted.”
– From Ecotopia - a proto-solarpunk novel by Ernest Callenbach, written in 1975. The book is written as a travelogue by an American reporter exploring the secessionist nation of Ecotopia.
Looking at the guidelines above you might see a bit of a trend emerging:
All of this combined would lead to bigger, bulkier, more expensive final designs, lacking some of the sleek finishes and trim we associate with modern products. Solarpunk products might look old fashioned or even unfinished to our eyes.
That said, a lot of this might be mitigated by the kind of iterative design improvement/refinement we already see in open source projects on thingiverse and other .stl sharing sites. The level of quality produced by volunteer designers collaborating on hobby projects has amazed me plenty of times over the years, and a world where passionate people create, release, and improve free designs for everyday products, and small, local shops produce them as needed, feels very solarpunk.
And because these items are generally being fabricated as needed, it's generally easier to add any customizations the end-user might need. This might be as 'simple' as mirroring the design for a left-handed user before fabricating parts, but it could include all kinds of interesting mods, including aesthetic ones.
There are also other ways to make something visually appealing. Older products often featured all kinds of embossing, etching, gilding, or other artwork. Various iterations of the punk scene have placed a heavy emphasis on DIY and customization. Perhaps a solarpunk society where resale value is a low priority might add colorful custom decoration and embellishment to its tech and appliances. Perhaps small workshops would produce a run of appliances to spec in every way but a decorated case, or perhaps people would add art once they got it home.
Other Examples:
So everything up to this point was about new production. What would newly made goods, appliances, electronics, etc look like in a solarpunk society? But it’s very likely that a huge majority of stuff would pre-exist that transition. Corporate-made goods represent a vast majority the stuff from appliances to tools to vehicles we use in our current world and regardless of its flaws, that stuff generally works and represents a significant amount of embodied carbon (the energy/polution already spent to extract the resources, transport them, turn them into workable materials, transport them, produce the item, and transport it). So it’s very likely that a solarpunk world would still be using a lot of old corporate-produced items. How that looks is very much up to you, and the nature of your setting. Perhaps old items have been limped along for decades with hacky modifications and adjustments kludged on to keep them running. Perhaps even unfixable machines are sought-after and stripped for reusable parts to maintain an every-shrinking fleet of that make and model. Perhaps the work of finding and ‘open sourcing’ their documentation is an ongoing community project, and the most common modifications used to keep them running or to bring them up to code with solarpunk expectations are public projects. (One post I found mentioned reverse engineering a burned-out, rare, manufacturer-specific Integrated Circuit and replacing it with a small VERO board using discrete components - that sort of fix might be documented and shared to help others in similar circumstances).
And perhaps some corporate designs need no improvement and are simply copied in modern, unlicensed production. Some corporate goods are genuinely long lasting and resilient even if only accidentally, and Buy-It-For-Life groups online go out of their way to find and document these items. Some of these items are simple enough, and have existed for long enough that the design is practically open source already. For example, with some older cars, the schematics, dimensions of parts, etc have been thoroughly documented and so many replacement parts are produced to spec by off-brand manufacturers that you could likely assemble one without ever buying anything from the corporation that produced it. Cars might not be the best fit for your solarpunk setting, but this sort of gradual slide into open source is something that might get formalized once the design catalogues discussed in the introduction become popular.
And there’s certainly room for an appreciation for history and style – it may be that some old corporate stuff is highly sought-after because they literally don’t make it like that anymore, even if for good reason. Perhaps extremely thin, fast smartphones or other sleek technology have a place in modern society a bit like whalebone or ivory antiques – unethical when they were made, but the practice has ended and modern collectors appreciate them for what they are.
Recycling things that are themselves designed to be DIY-friendly:
