A Speculative Design project exploring the sustainable value of products designed to elicit an emotional attachment.

What if… we don’t need any more products?

Products are constantly being designed and redesigned for problems deemed necessary to create a product solution. In an age of both peak climate change and peak accessibility to a myriad of products for every problem, there is a lack of purpose behind so many products being designed, using finite resources to do so. There is a distinct struggle between mass consumerism and manufacturing versus product purpose and sustainability. What if we simply do not need any more products?

The Project

“To highlight to consumers and designers that a product shouldn’t be created ‘just because’ or for the solution of a minor inconvenience. It should have a significant purpose and be purchased or designed consciously, for a reason that warrants a product solution.” – Mission Statement to define The Project

The Problem

This project is more of a mission, a conversation to be had, a purpose to reassess among designers. It was concluded that Speculative Design was the best way to articulate this through a product – a form of proposing future designs of a critical nature. I wanted to create a product to trigger conversation and challenge current understanding of what the future could be. Affective Sustainability was chosen as the most suitable ‘problem’ within the Mission Statement.

Affective Sustainability is when a user behaves sustainably due to an emotional attachment. Due to this affection, the product is not thrown away lightly but instead is fixed when broken or kept longer instead of replaced. The result of this is a longer lifetime due to attachment, maybe even love. This is such a pure form of sustainability. One that does not require any conscious effort (recycling, disassembly etc). The aim was to see if it was possible to intentionally design this emotional attachment into features on a product to make that product sustainable not in the traditional, physical sense but in the emotional sense.

“Landfills around the world swell with fully functional appliances – freezers that still freeze and toasters that still toast – their only crime being a failure to sustain empathy with their users.” – Jonathan Chapman, ‘Emotionally Durable Design’

The Product

Within the problem of Affective Sustainability, what the product itself is, is not important. The product is a vessel to develop, test and demonstrate the translation of emotional attachment, into designed features on the product. In this case, that product is a kettle.

Alongside psychology research, the kettle has been designed using the standard design process as any product would. However, it has been designed with the added process and purpose of being affectively sustainable. Aspects such as material choice, technologies used, touchpoints and interactions have not only been designed to meet standard user criteria but also to instigate an emotional attachment from the user. Life cycle analyses were then completed of both a standard plastic kettle and the redesigned affectively sustainable plastic kettle to project the potential environmental impact benefit of this form of sustainability.

Conclusion

Emotional attachment triggers can be designed into the features of a product. This gives the user a subconscious motivation to act sustainably through the attachment they have with that product. The result of this is ultimately a longer product lifetime. Although causing an initially higher environmental impact through the materials and manufacturing used to create the product with the added emotional attachment design features, the impact of the product over its lifetime is significantly reduced.

The successful implementation of Affective Sustainability can be a genuine contributor to the goal of truly effective, long-term sustainability.