FISHBONE 3.5MM AUDIO ADAPTER

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
HARDWARE ENGINEERING
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
DESIGN STRATEGY AND RESEARCH

The FISHBONE, currently available from AVID Education, is a cheap solution to the expensive problem of 3.5mm audio pins breaking off inside jacks on electronic devices.

The FISHBONE project began with a research intensive which revealed that young students frequently forget that they are wearing headphones or earphones and move beyond the reach of the headphone cord. Oftentimes, this motion is sudden. When this happened in the past, the 3.5mm pin often broke off inside the audio jack. The average cost of this repair is about $70 per jack and requires specialist tools and training to execute. The FISHBONE helps eliminate these repair costs by realigning its built-in audio jack colinear to the direction of strain allowing the pin to pull cleanly out without snapping and saving the jack on the computing device in the process.

In 2017, the FISHBONE was awarded Best in Show at the annual International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference in San Antonio, Texas.