10.   Post-use Management

If you design your product as well as possible there should be nothing to waste at the end of its first entirely sustainable use-life. It should be fully consumed or inertly biodegradable, entirely disassemblable, reusable or recyclable in low impacting ways into other, needed products. Its material value will either be fully retained or transformable in a low or no impact manner into equally valued materials whose life purposes will more than make up for any environmental impacts. Your product will spend its life communicating sustainability sustainably with 'users' who will use, maintain, repair and care for it properly.

Additionally, by using your product, users will develop new sustainable habits and new insights into the other unsustainable products in their lives. The manufacturer will organise for the low impact collection of these materials to be fed into low impacting and exceptionally managed materials recovery and remanufacture programs...sounding a bit idealistic?

Even if all these things could be achieved, the perfect product does not exist because no matter how carefully you design something, environments are not and will never be entirely calculable (this, in a nutshell, is the main problem with scientifically derived environmental management systems). We can however, work toward creating sustainments even though the world is full of designers, products and processes 'sustaining the unsustainable'. The more sustainments that are designed—ethical products aware of the power of design—the more the possibility of a more generally sustainable culture will arrive.

This last set of questions is about consolidating what you have learnt by doing this guide. This is followed with a design process audit and a redesign task—tips for writing a 'return brief' incorporating some of what you have learnt.

Questions:
 
1 How many use-lives will your product potentially have, and drawing on your research summarise how its design will support this?(materials, material interfaces, instructions, infrastructure etc.)
2 Will the user be able to disassemble the product easily, for example will the components be comprehensively labelled?
3  How will information about the management of post-use be included with product; where will prompts/instructions be located (for example on an internal computer chip; manuals, embedded into the materials)?
4 Will there be any kinds of incentives offered to users for the return of products or parts; will these incentives also be sustainments?
5 Will there be any kinds of feedback mechanisms in place, any way that users can document their experiences or otherwise participate in the design process so that the designer can learn from the culture of use the product has designed?
6 Your last task before rewriting the design brief is to summarise the audit of your design process. To do this, we suggest you use your log information to draw an 'ecomap': a visual schematic representation of your work process. Draw a simple diagram of your work space and try to locate the sites of intensity of energy or materials use. This is a quick way to identify key areas of unsustainability in your process, but should not replace a more thorough assessment of the main ecological impacts associated with the material and energy inputs and outputs you have logged. What changes or adjustments to your work process do you need to make, and how might the physical assembly of your space assist in this? For further information on this process see Eco- Mapping.
7 Finally, visit Seven Tips for a Return Brief . For help with research, check out User Research.
Please communicate with us about this guide - Comments and Questions Welcome.