The picture above shows Monkey, a faithful friend of ten year old Brigitta. Monkey, too, is ten years old and has withstood much loving and a few surgical operations. There is no way that Monkey will ever be thrown away. He has passed the challenge of Change Design's Decadesign.
What if all products were required to have a minimum 10-year use life? How would products need to be redesigned, what service economies would make such a proposal feasible and what products could successfully petition for exemption? This is an ongoing debate and evolving design brief for Change Design Members. Please feel free to contribute to the debate.
The Decadesign challenge targets short-life products. One way to slow down consumption and material throughput is to extend the life of our currently short-term products. Much less energy and materials would be needed if we held on to these products for longer. Disposability is big business, however, and is constantly advertised as the most hygienic and convenient solution. The 'single-serve' attitude is deeply entrenched in our lifestyles and it is difficult to imagine a world without disposable rubber gloves, razors, biros, lighters, and packaging. In 'convenience' consumption we are encouraged not to care or to 'think' about our short-term products. So, we decided to turn the tables on disposability and set a design task based on a fictitious mandate of ten years use life for every product. What would happen?
Manufacturers would be forced to enhance their products' reliability and/or introduce maintenance, service, upgrade arrangements to extend products' use-lives. This initiative differs from the sort of extended-producer-responsibility (EPR) legislation now being introduced into the EU by forcing an extension of product use-life, where EPR can encourage increased material-throughput (e.g. disposability) so long as it is part of a recycling system. As is frequently pointed out, there are always significant ecological impacts associated with recycling, from transport emissions through mechanical energy demands to toxic chemical processing, impacts that are avoided if products have longer use-lives.Designers would have to dramatically change their thinking. How can an everyday product become cherishable for a decade? Here we can look to the advice of the Dutch group, Eternally Yours. They research the psychology and sociology of things, discerning how people relate to the products they use. Eternally Yours make recommendations about how relations with products can be 'designed in' so that the use-life of those products is extended. Which products for example would you repair rather than replace, even if repair costs more than replacement? Are there exemptions?
There are clearly products that can only have short lives and therefore would need to be exempted by being part of a recycling system, however the onus would be on the manufacturer to seek an exemption from the Decadesign rule. An important candidate for exemption is medical and scientific equipment. When Claire, a biochemist by training, was doing volunteer research work at EDF, she told us about the rampant disposability that is a necessary part of any scientific laboratory. Nearly all equipment is removed from sterilised packaging, used once and then thrown away. Claire told us about the almost pathological once-only mentality that some of her colleagues had after ruining experiments with contamination. Cleanliness paranoia has put pay to plenty of re-use initiatives, such as glass bottles, and even some recycling initiatives, such as turning beverage container plastics back into beverage containers. In this age of ecological, and now terrorist, risks, does the Decadesign virus stand any chance? Clearly the situation of the laboratory complicates this issue further. Research is urgently needed into cleaning technologies vs. disposables for such contexts. Wealthy bio-tech companies should feel welcome to give EDF pots of money to look into this.
Recognising that such mandated dematerialisation through product life extension was unlikely to arrive, we set the brief for future collaborations of designing the economic systems that could enable marketable moves toward Decadesign. In the meantime, EDF is asking anyone if they can think of anything that must have a use-life of shorter than 10 years. Toothbrush heads seem to be only valid candidate so far. Email us with other suggestions.
Links
Eternally
Yours
