John Payne's Library tagged consumption → View Popular

22 Mar 09

What are the implications for industrial designers if the strongest consumer impulse becomes not buying?

Apple and Dell can perhaps no longer rely on an army of beta-testing first adopters who will pay an absurd price to troubleshoot version one of the next iPhone, essentially subsidizing Apple’s development of a cheaper, debugged upgrade for everyone else.

We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.

We get more of what we measure. If we measure consumption we will get more of it. If we measure participation we will get more of that and we might just find we are already far wealthier than we realize, or perhaps far poorer. More importantly if our economy measured different types of value we could focus on designing things that created growth without automatically requiring that we consume more stuff.

I’m excited about this development because I’ve long been an advocate of Less Stuff, and I think it provides a remarkable opportunity for those of us who work in the area of designing for services and experiences.

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