DESIGNING
PRODUCT SUSTAINMENTS
The problem with product design is the product. Designers are educated to be the makers of things. This has two unsustainable consequences.
Designers firstly often fail to see that many problems can be solved without a product. Those problems that may require product-based solutions invariably involve other behavioural and attitudinal changes, for which the product becomes a prompt or crutch. Products only function when people learn how to use them and acculturate the way they live to how that product works. This means that the majority of what needs to be designed is the relation between the user and the product rather than simply the product.
The second consequence is that designers tend to think that their work has been completed when they hand over a blueprint for a product to the client or manufacturer. A product is not only designed however, but through its interface with its users, continues to design throughout its use-life. A designer should also be responsible for a product at the end of its use-life, having already designed subsequent lives for its components and materials.
Sustainments are designed solutions to problems that change the way people behave, sometimes through their relation to a designed product. Sustainments are designs that are designed to design the ability to sustain in those who use them. Designers of sustainments 'stay with' what they design, learning from its faults and intervening to improve their designs throughout their use.
