3.   Some Questions about need

This step is about justifying the existence of your product. This is probably the most difficult stage, because we are usually itching to get to the making of things. So why should you have to do this? Partly because, as strategic designer Ezio Manzini has said, the world is full of too much making and not enough designing. In other words, we live in a world abundant with unsustainable products that are half thought through at best, mostly designed on 'autopilot'. Software encourages the full rendering of partly realised ideas and the time frame between concept and manufacturing has become shorter and shorter. In these conditions, we have to think much more carefully about needs.

The question about what we need is a very difficult one to answer in our consumer-driven culture because wants have become indistinguishable from needs. A successful product sets up new parameters of need, but with far too many products, the needfulness of these needs falls apart under the most cursory consideration (you would have noticed, for example, the almost hysterical ergonomics of recent toothbrush design, and perhaps asked yourself do we really need such multi-textured, multi-coloured, hyper-flexible toothbrushes? Not only do these toothbrushes have a bigger bill of materials, require more manufacturing, marketing and packaging, but suddenly, they make a plain handled toothbrush, even one with a replaceable 'head', look 'poor quality'!). We need to learn what it is we need—we can't just rely on our intuitive feelings about needfulness.

The ways in which we currently meet our need to 'create' or 'make' for example, also adds to the problem of over production. Our current ecological circumstances clearly indicate that we need to learn to design for less materially intensive ways of living and working. So you need to ask yourself: is your product needed, why is it needed, can this need be met in other ways that reduce the need for yet another product in the world? Design for sustainability means asking yourself these questions and finding new ways of answering them. This implies a process of reflection, discovery and change.

Exercises: