With the mass proliferation of gadgets and IoT devices, users are spoiled for choice when they are looking to buy a new device. But the only information available to the users at the purchase are the price and the features that the “salesmen/website” give them.
But a discerning customer should make a more informed choice about his purchase, so he largely knows the impact of his purchase/choice. This is where OrUsDe rating would come in to play. This rating has 3 numbers, each associated with the different stages of the product Origin, Usage and Destruction. A glance at the rating should give you a general Idea of what buying a product means.
Origin – Measured in Humaneness goes from 0 to 100 %
The origin of the product is measured in humaneness, it tells you how much damage the creation of your product makes. The lowest score of the following gives the humaneness rating:
- Manufacturing Standards / Environmental Impact during manufacture (Does the factory that makes the device follow proper environmental safety protocols, are the standards of manufacturing kept)
- Raw material sourcing standards (Does the product use conflict minerals or materials whose extraction is not environmentally safe)
- Labour standards (Is the device made without slave labour and are the makers of the device well paid /cared for)
- Tax rules (Does the manufacturer use tax havens to escape its debt to the system)
Each of these needs to be measured by an independent relevant body (Some already are) and the lowest of these is converted to a percentage score that reveals the humanity of the devices origin
Why no average of the metrics: the metrics are not averaged because paying your workers well doesn’t mean you can use conflict resources.
Usage – measured in days ( 0 to Infinity )
The usage metric is measured in years and gives you the ideal lifetime of a product. This is a complex metric made by multiplying 2 numbers a life measure and a quality-of-life measure.
Life measures:
- SoftWare Support – How long the manufacturer promises to support the software, by giving feature/os updates, security fixes etc
- HardWare life- How long the manufacturer claims the hardware will last , for example life of the battery ( number of cycles) etc
- Infrastructure support – How long the manufacturers will support critical infrastructure like servers etc needed for the device/gadget to run
These measures are measured in days
Quality of life measures:
- Energy efficiency – How energy efficient is the product. (Government mandated energy rating)
- Privacy -How safe is the data collected by your product, is it sold/shared with 3rd parties, used for improvements, given to outside contractors etc (tech crunch privacy score for example)
- Repairability – How easy is your device to repair, can you repair it yourself ( Ifixit repairability scores for example)
- Support quality – Is it easy to get support for your device, are service centres easily found (This rating will be geography/location based)
- Spare part price ratio : price of the spare part , in ratio to the price of the entire device itself
- Ownership – Do you actually own the product and it’s internals, or are they in reality leased to you ( like on an amazon kindle, the books can be remotely deleted, which means you don’t truly own the books [ Compared to an actual book , which once bought has no way to be taken away from you ] )
The quality-of-life measure is again converted to scores that measured from 0 to 1.
The lowest life score is then multiplied with the lowest quality of life score and the resulting number of days is converted into years. Thereby telling you how long, you can or should expect to use your product.
Destruction – Measured in planets (0 to 5)
The destruction of the device inherently affects the planet, so these are the measures that detail how it affects the planet.
- Recyclability – How recyclable is the device and how much effort has the manufacturer to aid in the recycling of the device.
- Upcycling – How easily the hw and sw can be reconfigured to enable the use of the device for an alternate use case ( Eg Samsung upcycling )
- Resale value – Resale value of the device one year down the line
Each of this is converted into a score from 0 to 5, and the lowest is used .
These ratings don’t cover extended warranty kind of situations , but in most cases i believe are vitally helpful.
Illustrative example :
The imaginary Iplone 5 that last 8 years
The iplone 5 if it didn’t respect your privacy . OrUsDe would recommend you used it for 0 days.
A privacy score of 0 would be multiplies by lifetime score of x, leaving a recommended usage period of 0 days
The iplone 5 if you could use it for forever.
The Qr code would take you to the device’s OrUsDe page where, you could see the detailed report on the device and how the scores were calculated
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