Emotionally Durable Design

Emotionally Durable Design presents counterpoints to our ‘throwaway society’ by developing powerful design tools, methods and frameworks that build resilience into relationships between people and things. The book takes us beyond the sustainable design field’s established focus on energy and materials, to engage the underlying psychological phenomena that shape patterns of consumption and waste. In fluid and accessible writing, the author asks: why do we discard products that still work? He then moves forward to define strategies for the design of products that people want to keep for longer. Along the way we are introduced to over twenty examples of emotional durability in smart phones, shoes, chairs, clocks, teacups, toasters, boats and other material experiences. Emotionally Durable Design transcends the prevailing doom and gloom rhetoric of sustainability discourse, to pioneer a more hopeful, meaningful and resilient form of material culture. This second edition features pull-out quotes, illustrated product examples, a running glossary and comprehensive stand firsts; this book can be read cover to cover, or dipped in-and-out of. It is a daring call to arms for professional designers, educators, researchers and students from in a range of disciplines from product design to architecture; framing an alternative genre of design that reduces the consumption and waste of resources by increasing the durability of relationships between people and things.

In today's unsustainable world of goods, where products are desired, purchased, briefly used and then promptly landfilled to make way for more, consumption and waste are rapidly spiralling out of control with truly devastating ecological consequences. Why do we, as a consumer society, have such short-lived and under-stimulating relationships with the objects that we invest such time, thought and money in acquiring, but that will soon be thoughtlessly discarded? Emotionally Durable Design is a call to arms for professionals, students and academic creatives; proposing the emergence of a new genre of sustainable design that reduces consumption and waste by increasing the durability of relationships established between users and products. In this provocative text, Jonathan Chapman pioneers a radical design about-face to reduce the impact of modern consumption without compromising commercial viability or creative edge. The author explores the essential question, why do users discard products that still work? It transports the reader beyond symptom-focused approaches to sustainable design such as design for recycling, biodegradeability and disassembly, to address the actual causes that underpin the environmental crisis we face. The result is a revealing exploration of consumer psychology and the deep motivations that fuel the human condition, and a rich resource of creative strategies and practical tools that will enable designers from a range of disciplines to explore new ways of thinking and of designing objects capable of supporting deeper and more meaningful relationships with their users. This is fresh thinking for a brave new world of creative, durable and sustainable products, buildings, spaces and designed experiences.

In today's unsustainable world of goods, where products are desired, purchased, briefly used and then promptly landfilled to make way for more, consumption and waste are rapidly spiralling out of control with truly devastating ecological consequences. Why do we, as a consumer society, have such short-lived and under-stimulating relationships with the objects that we invest such time, thought and money in acquiring, but that will soon be thoughtlessly discarded? Emotionally Durable Design is a call to arms for professionals, students and academic creatives; proposing the emergence of a new genre of sustainable design that reduces consumption and waste by increasing the durability of relationships established between users and products. In this provocative text, Jonathan Chapman pioneers a radical design about-face to reduce the impact of modern consumption without compromising commercial viability or creative edge. The author explores the essential question, why do users discard products that still work? It transports the reader beyond symptom-focused approaches to sustainable design such as design for recycling, biodegradeability and disassembly, to address the actual causes that underpin the environmental crisis we face. The result is a revealing exploration of consumer psychology and the deep motivations that fuel the human condition, and a rich resource of creative strategies and practical tools that will enable designers from a range of disciplines to explore new ways of thinking and of designing objects capable of supporting deeper and more meaningful relationships with their users.This is fresh thinking for a brave new world of creative, durable and sustainable products, buildings, spaces and designed experiences.

An argument for a design philosophy of better, not more. Never have we wanted, owned, and wasted so much stuff. Our consumptive path through modern life leaves a wake of social and ecological destruction--sneakers worn only once, bicycles barely even ridden, and forgotten smartphones languishing in drawers. By what perverse alchemy do our newest, coolest things so readily transform into meaningless junk? In Meaningful Stuff, Jonathan Chapman investigates why we throw away things that still work, and shows how we can design products, services, and systems that last. Obsolescence is an economically driven design decision--a plan to hasten a product's functional or psychological undesirability. Many electronic devices, for example, are intentionally impossible to dismantle for repair or recycling, their brief use-career proceeding inexorably to a landfill. A sustainable design specialist who serves as a consultant to global businesses and governmental organizations, Chapman calls for the decoupling of economic activity from mindless material consumption and shows how to do it. Chapman shares his vision for an "experience heavy, material light" design sensibility. This vital and timely new design philosophy reveals how meaning emerges from designed encounters between people and things, explores ways to increase the quality and longevity of our relationships with objects and the systems behind them, and ultimately demonstrates why design can--and must--lead the transition to a sustainable future.

Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories unpacks the complex and crucial debates surrounding sustainable design to deliver a compelling manifesto for change, at a time of looming ecological crisis, mounting environmental legislation and limited progress. This is a book about sustainable design, by the leading sustainable design thinkers, for creative practitioners, professionals, students and academics. This challenging work provides the reader with a rich resource of future visions, critical propositions, creative ideas and design strategies for working towards a sustainable tomorrow, today. The authors boldly present alternative understandings of sustainable design, to curate a challenging, sometimes uncomfortable and always provocative, collection of essays by some of the worlds leading sustainable design thinkers. The result is an impacting and polemical anthology that reinvigorates the culture of critique that, in previous years, has empowered design with the qualities of social, environmental and economic revolution.

This book discusses the most significant ways in which design has been applied to sustainability challenges using an evolutionary perspective. It puts forward an innovation framework that is capable of coherently integrating multiple design for sustainability (DfS) approaches developed so far. It is now widely understood that design can and must play a crucial role in the societal transformations towards sustainability. Design can in fact act as a catalyst to trigger and support innovation, and can help to shape the world at different levels: from materials to products, product–service systems, social organisations and socio-technical systems. This book offers a unique perspective on how DfS has evolved in the past decades across these innovation levels, and provides insights on its promising and necessary future development directions. For design scholars, this book will trigger and feed the academic debate on the evolution of DfS and its next research frontiers. For design educators, the book can be used as a supporting tool to design courses and programmes on DfS. For bachelor’s and master’s level design, engineering and management students, the book can be a general resource to provide an understanding of the historical evolution of DfS. For design practitioners and businesses, the book offers a rich set of practical examples, design methods and tools to apply the various DfS approaches in practice, and an innovation framework which can be used as a tool to support change in organisations that aim to integrate DfS in their strategy and processes.

Understanding emotions is becoming ever more valuable in design, both in terms of what people prefer as well as in relation to how they behave in relation to it. Approaches to conceptualising emotions in technology design, how emotions can be operationalised and how they can be measured are paramount to ascertaining the core principles of design. Emotions in Technology Design: From Experience to Ethics provides a multi-dimensional approach to studying, designing and comprehending emotions in design. It presents emotions as understood through basic human-technology research, applied design practice, culture and aesthetics, ethical approaches to emotional design, and ethics as a cultural framework for emotions in design experience. Core elements running through the book are: cognitive science – cognitive-affective theories of emotions (i.e., Appraisal); culture – the ways in which our minds are trained to recognise, respond to and influence design; and ethics – a deep cultural framework of interpretations of good versus evil. This ethical understanding brings culture and cognition together to form genuine emotional experience. This book is essential reading for designers, technology developers, HCI and cognitive science scholars, educators and students (at both undergraduate and graduate levels) in terms of emotional design methods and tools, systematic measurement of emotion in design experience, cultural theory underpinning how emotions operate in the production and interaction of design, and how ethics influence basic (primal) and higher level emotional reactions. The broader scope equips design practitioners, developers and scholars with that ‘something more’ in terms of understanding how emotional experience of technology can be positioned in relation to cultural discourse and ethics.

Design for Sustainable Change explores how design thinking and design-led entrepreneurship can address the issue of sustainability. It discusses the ways in which design thinking is evolving and being applied to a much wider spectrum of social and environmental issues, beyond its traditional professional territory. The result is designers themselves evolving, and developing greater design mindfulness in relation to what they do and how they do it. This book looks at design thinking as a methodology which, by its nature, considers issues of sustainability, but which does not necessarily seek to define itself in those terms. It explores the gradual extension of this methodology into the larger marketplace and the commercial and social implications of such an extension.