Community Ecology Perspectives on the Structural and Functional Evolution of Consumer Electronics

Summary This article describes how biological ecology models are adapted to analyze the dynamic structure and function of a consumer electronic product “community.” Treating an entire group of interdependent and continually evolving electronic devices as an ecological community provides a basis for more comprehensive analyses of the energy, material, and waste flows associated with household consumption than would be possible using conventional per product approaches. Results show that, similar to a maturing natural community, the average U.S. household electronic product community evolved from a low‐diversity structure dominated by a few products to a highly diverse, evenly distributed community of products between 1990 and 2010. The maturing community of household electronics experienced increased functionality at a community and product level resulting, in part, from introduction of new products, but primarily as a result of increasing ownership of multifunctional products. Multifunctional mobile products are driving increased functionality in a manner similar to a broadly adaptive invasive species, but the community's high functional redundancy, as the result of device convergence, resembles a stable natural community. These results suggest that future strategies to encourage green design, production, and consumption of consumer electronics should focus on minimizing the total number of products owned by maximizing multifunctionality with convergent device design.