Designed to last:
Could better design cure our throwaway culture
Jonathan Chapman, a senior lecture at the University of Brighton, UK, is one of a new breed of “sustainable designers’. Like many of us, they are concerned about the huge waste (which is) associated with Western consumer culture and the damage this does to the environment. Some, like Chapman, aim to create objects (that) we will want to keep rather than discard. with recycling in mind. The waste (which is) entailed in our fleeting relationships with consumer durables is colossal.
Domestic power tools, such as electric drills, are a typical example of such waste. However much DIY the purchaser plans to do, the truth is that these things are thrown away having been used, on average, for just ten minutes. Most will serve conscience time, gathering dust on a shelf in the garage; people are reluctant to admit that they have wasted their money. However, the end is inevitable: thousands of years in landfill waste sites. In its design, manufacture, packaging, transportation and disposal, a power tool consumes many times its own weight in resources, all for a shorter active lifespan than that of the average small insect.
To understand why we have become so wasteful, we should look to the underlying motivation of consumers. ‘People own things to give expression to who they are, and to show what group of people they feel they belong to,’ Chapman says. In a world of mass production, however, that symbolism has lost much of its potency. For most of human history, people had an intimate relationship with objects (that) they used or treasured. Often they made the objects themselves, or family members passed them on. For more specialist objects, people relied on expert manufacturers living close by, whom they probably knew personally. Chapman points out that all these factors gave objects a history – a narrative – and an emotional connection that today’s mass production cannot match. Without these personal connections, consumerist culture instead idolizes novelty. People know that they can’t buy happiness, but the chance to remake ourselves with glossy, box-fresh products seems irresistible. When the novelty fades we simply renew the excitement by buying more.
Chapman’s solution is what he calls "emotionally durable design". He says (that) the challenge for designers is to create things (that) we want to keep. This may sound like a tall order, but it can be surprisingly straightforward. A favorite pair of old jeans, for example, just do not have the right feel until they have been worn and washed a hundred times. Walter Stahel, visiting professor at the University of Surrey, calls it the "teddy-bear factor”. No matter how ragged and worn a favorite teddy becomes, we don't rush out and buy another one. As adults, our teddy bear connects us to our childhoods and this protects it from obsolescence. Stahel argues that this is what sustainable design needs to do with more products.
The Information Age was supposed to lighten our economies and reduce our impact on the environment, but, in fact, the reverse seems to be happening. We have simply added information technology to the industrial era and hastened the developed world's metabolism. The cure is hardly rocket science: minimize waste and energy use, stop moving stuff around so much and use people more. So what will post-throwaway consumerism look like? It might be as simple as installing energy-saving light bulbs, more efficient washing machines, or choosing locally produced groceries with less packaging. In general, we will spend less on goods and more on services. Instead of buying a second car, for example, we might buy into a car-sharing network. Rather than following our current wasteful practices, we will buy less and rent a lot more; why own things such as tools that you use infrequently, especially things are likely to be updated all the time?
Consumer durables will be sold with plans already in place for their disposal. Electronic goods will be designed to be recyclable, with the extra cost added to the retail price. Following Chapman’s notion of emotionally durable design, there will be a move away from mass production and towards tailor – made articles and products designed and manufactured with greater craftsmanship, products which will be repaired rather than replaced, in the same way as was done in our grandparents’ time. Companies will replace profit from bulk sales by servicing and repairing products chosen because we want them to last.
Chapman acknowledges that it will be a challenge to persuade people to buy fewer goods, and ones that they intend to keep. At the moment, price competition between retailers makes it cheaper for consumers to replace rather than repair.
Products designed to be durable and emotionally satisfying are likely to be more expensive, so how will we be persuaded to choose sustainability? Tim Cooper, from the Centre for Sustainable Consumption at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, points out that many people are already happy to pay a premium for quality, and that they also tend to value and care more for expensive goods. is also positive: “People are ready to keep things for longer,” he says, “The problem is that a lot of industries don’t know how to do that.” Chapman believes that sustainable design is here to stay. “The days when large corporations were in a position to choose whether to jump on the sustainability bandwagon or not are coming to an end,” he says. Whether this is also the beginning of the end of the throwaway society remains to be seen.
