Modularity — designing products with readily changeable or upgradeable components — underwent a vogue in late sixties and early seventies as part of the appropriate and alternative technology movements. Unfortunately, a lack of sensitivity to cultural (and intracultural) difference gave the idea a bad reputation. Modular design was seen as resulting in uniform products and buildings which, whilst being modifiable, were never able to function smoothly in any one chosen setting. However, modularity can be an important source of sustainment if designed carefully.
Modularity is clearly important and already practised in most larger devices comprising many components of different length use-lives. Car spare parts are a clear example, and ease of finding spares is often a life-cycle costing consideration of cars buyers.
In the area of IT, with products undergoing rapid changes as technological infrastructures develop, converge and differentiate, modularity is the only alternative to the mass junking of partially obsolete devices. Most computers systems promote their upgradeability by promising to make new parts interchangeable with old ones.
Analogue systems limit the possibilities for modularity by necessitating specialised forms. However, it is a sign of the fact that we are have not yet entered the digital age that so few digital devices can function modularly, allowing themselves to be reprogrammed into a range of different devices.
Even when disposal of products is necessary, modularity is way of facilitating materials recovery. The sustainment that comes with modularity however is not only at the users' end. By avoiding the need the for continual retooling, manufacturers can achieve major ecoefficiency and cleaner production gains.
The principle behind modular design is perhaps the most powerful way in which modularity can be a sustainment. By making plain that every purchase involves a commitment to certain set of mid-to-long consequences, and that difference is possible, but only within limits of a sustainable palette, modularity combats the 'you can always get something else' attitude that is a driver of our current unsustainability. Sustainments are the sort of environments that make this modular approach to work and living desirable.
It should be apparent that modularity fits with many of other forms of sustainments being explained in this section of the site: eg extended producer responsibility, advanced simplicity, long-life products, products that learn, industrial ecology.
