Improving sustainability in Product Design
Key takeaways from Yoshiyuki Matsuoka’s book ‘Design Science for Product Creation x Product Usage’.
Think ‘sustainability’ and words like recycling and renewable materials usually pop up. Yoshiyuki Matsuoka, a Design Professor at Keio University encourages an additional way - by getting people to use products for longer, fall back in love with things, and design for the changes in scenarios people go through in life with the product. The focus is on reducing waste by improving value and desirability over time. He calls this “value growth design” (p.29).
We all know things we’ve bought that we treasure more over time, even if it’s decaying. This is the type of value we can design into our products to combat the throwaway society. We can do this by considering the temporal aspect of product design. We can ask: How does product function change over time, based on circumstances, life, and needs? Yoshiyuki calls this “timeaxis design” (p.55).
3 ways to increase product value over time:
Design for personalization, personality, or attachment through repeated usage and care.
For example, a baseball glove that takes on a personal fit, Hagi pottery that naturally changes colour and personality with time due to the properties of the clay, or a piano that you become more attached to every time you clean and tune it.
Design products that learn preferences and get more customized with usage.
For example, AI that becomes more efficient as it learns your patterns, your smartphone that you’ve customised settings for, or certain materials that memorise your shape.
Design a new circumstance, that then creates a new relationship with the product.
For example, holding an annual kite flying competition would make it more meaningful to hold on to your old kite year after year. As you grow older, more memories are formed and the sentimental value of your kite goes up. Soon enough, the kite is seen as a loyal comrade in the competition!
This is some pottery I made in Hagi, it’s not the shape I intended, and not a design I’d be inclined to buy, but since it has my name engraved on the bottom, I guess I will keep it!
Having an annual kite competition could increase the value of an otherwise ordinary kite, year on year. What circumstances could be designed for products to take on new meaning? Image by @moonboyz
Humans have the ability to find meaning - we should design for them to find it.
Tangential reflection
I am particularly attracted to the idea of designing circumstances that surround products. Stepping away from the topic of sustainability for a moment, perhaps we can think about this more when designing for product adoption. For example, in healthcare, patients often struggle to integrate the proper use of medical devices into their routines. In such a case, designing circumstances at the same time as designing products could be beneficial.