Developing scenarios for product longevity and sufficiency

Dewberry, Emma; Sheldrick, Leila; Sinclair, Matt; Moreno, Mariale; Matkatsoris, Harris

Abstract

This paper explores the narrative of peoples' relationships with products as a window on understanding the types of innovation that may inform a culture of sufficiency. The work forms part of the ‘Business as Unusual: Designing Products with Consumers in the Loop’ [BaU] project, funded as part of the UK EPSRC-ESRC RECODE network (RECODE, 2016) that aims to explore the potential of re-distributed manufacturing (RdM) in a context of sustainability. This element of the project employed interviews, mapping and workshops as methods to investigate the relationship between people and products across the product lifecycle. A focus on product longevity and specifically the people-product interactions is captured in conversations around product maintenance and repair. In exploring ideas of ‘broken’ we found different characteristics of, and motivations for, repair. Mapping these and other product-people interactions across the product lifecycle indicated where current activity is, who owns such activity (i.e. organisation or individual) where gaps in interactions occur. These issues were explored further in a workshop which grouped participants to look at products from the perspective of one of four scenarios; each scenario represented either short or long product lifespans and different types of people engagement in the design process. The findings help give shape to new scenarios for designing sufficiency-based social models of material flows.

Citation

Dewberry, E., Sheldrick, L., Sinclair, M., Moreno, M., & Matkatsoris, H. (2017). Developing scenarios for product longevity and sufficiency. In PLATE: Product Lifetimes And The Environment (108-113). https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-820-4-108

• Conference Name: Product Lifetimes and the Environment (PLATE) 2017
• Conference Location: Delft University of Technology
• Start Date: Nov 8, 2017
• End Date: Nov 10, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Nov 8, 2017
• Publication Date: Nov 8, 2017
• Deposit Date: Dec 14, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 14, 2022
• Volume: 9
• Pages: 108-113
• Series Title: Research in Design
• Book Title: PLATE: Product Lifetimes And The Environment
• ISBN: 978-1-61499-819-8
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-820-4-108
• Keywords: Sufficiency, Product durability, Repair, Re-distributed manufacturing
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2967634
• Publisher URL: https://ebooks.iospress.nl/publication/47853