Social Design Entrepreneur

“You don’t own the car you drive, you don’t own your iPod you listen to and you certainly don’t own the TV you watch…”

Small is...

Or at least this is what I found myself convincing a group of festival goers huddled in a yurt on a bright Saturday afternoon a few weeks back.  The festival was “Small is…”, organised by Practical Action and Engineers Without Borders to celebrate the ideas of EF Schumacher in his book “Small is beautiful” and I had been invited to talk about my ideas on design for sustainability.

So, having stripped these poor people of their possessions I stood in the half-light and tried to dig myself out of a hole.

“Ownership, you see is the relationship between a product and a person.  The product fulfils its duty to its owner, and in return the owner takes responsibility for the product.  I would assert that in recent history this relationship has been moving towards extreme one-sidedness; products keep up their end of the bargain but we as owners seem to be shirking our responsibility.

For example, 60 years ago if you owned a car then you would, more than likely know how to tune it, you would be able to maintain it, and if it broke down on the side of the road you would probably have the tools and knowledge to fix it.  You would have responsibility for the physical object and therefore by my definition, you would have ownership of it.

Contrast that with modern day cars, how many people could strip down their car and, change the plugs?  How much maintenance does anyone really carry out on their cars? Fill up the water? The coolant? Change the oil? What about a tyre? We as a society have become so far removed from the responsibility of maintaining the vehicles we drive, that I would say that our side of the ownership relationship has broken down entirely.  Therefore, you don’t own your car, as the Maker’s Bill of Rights lays out: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it.

What you do own, what we as people are prepared to take responsibility for is the action of driving.  We own the function of products, not their physical manifestations.  And what is the consequence of this?  Well, if we only take responsibility for the function of a product, when it breaks, our responsibility (and ownership) ceases.  That then makes it very easy for us to throw stuff away.  How many people here have thrown away expensive objects just because they didn’t work any more?

Only owning a product function, by the way, isn’t really the problem.  Take a sky TV box, you never really own it, if it breaks you send it away and get a new one.  This works because what Sky sells you isn’t the ugly black box; it’s the action of watching TV.  The boundaries of the relationship are set out before anything has a chance to go wrong, people don’t throw out their skyboxes because the physical object is owned by someone else.

The problems arise for two reasons.  Firstly because physical objects seduce us, as purchasers, iPods are beautiful, sexy, lickable things and we are fooled into thinking that it is the shiny object we want, rather than the act of listening to music.  The second, related problem is that these shiny music boxes are completely unopenable (and therefore, according to Make, unownable).

So in order to move away from these two problems, we really need two distinct design and business models: the Sky model, where we as consumers take no responsibility for our physical objects and as soon as the function stops functioning we send them back to be repaired or recycled.  The alternative, then, is that we take full ownership for our products, take responsibility for their maintenance, repair and end of life.

I come at this from a development standpoint, and these are my principles for design against dependency. So if you want to design against dependency only one of those models really works, end users must be able and willing to open their products and take responsibility for the whole product lifespan.  Is important to make the distinction between being able to and having the desire to maintain.  ‘Being able to’ is relatively straightforward to design, you make it easy and safe to open the hood of your product and reduce the number of non-user serviceable parts.  Employ modularity and reduce the number of tools required etc…

Creating the desire to is slightly more complex, and it comes back to this idea of a relationship between user and object.  In order for a user to want to maintain a product it has to be valuable to them, and the cost of maintenance, in time, money and hassle has got to be significantly less than the cost of purchasing a replacement.  This means ultimately switching from an economy based around ‘buy cheap and often’ to one where we ‘buy expensive, once’.

So, the bottom-line? If you don’t want me to depend on you, allow and encourage me to take responsibility myself.  Make me something I can and want to maintain and you make me something I can truly own.