Sustainable Product Design - TEDTalks with Practitioner Insights
Read Time: 2 Minutes
Sustainable Product Design
“If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled, or composted, then it should be restricted, designed or removed from production.”
– Pete Seeger
Can we design products considering environmental, social, and economic impacts during the use life cycle? Can we ensure our products do not lose value at the end of their life cycle? Circular product design means designing products that do not create waste or pollution and allow for the recirculation or reuse of materials, parts, and components and the end of their lives. The following TED talks challenge our views regarding sustainable design and the new mindsets that must drive future designs.
How to make sure materials get reused – again and again by Garry Cooper
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Practitioner Insights:
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The design of products must consider their impact on the environment as materials degrade and generate linear waste.
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Physical resources should find another life and extend their value after their natural consumption cycle. Eco-designers should define ownership transitions as created, used, and obsolete products, thus creating a second and third life for every physical resource.
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In a circular economy, designers must understand the production and manufacturing processes and the cost of reuse of their proposed concepts and ensure that materials are reused.
Watch Time: 13 minutes
The route to a sustainable future by Alex Steffen
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Practitioner Insights:
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Sustainability pushes us to create value, defined from a system’s perspective. It is not enough to think about the product and the user.
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The way to sustainability is to change the way consumers live and the lifestyles they aspire to have. Designers have the responsibility to ideate those new lifestyles.
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Design inspiration enacts from controlling consumption in real-time, intelligent, responsive designs, sharing consumption, monitoring consumption for resource optimization, bio-mimicry, neo-biological
Watch Time: 17 minutes
Architecture that repairs itself? by Rachel Armstrong
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Practitioner Insights:
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Visualizing designs that connect concepts and ideas to nature is a powerful strategy in ideation.
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Can we use living materials or make our designs have life by incorporating self-sustaining energy sources into those designs?
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A new generation of metabolic materials with different possible “states,” from inert to living matter, is being researched.
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Protocells technologies promise to overcome the traditional perspective of “structure over matter” by designing interfaces where the materials give the structure new properties, i.e., grow, self-repair, respond to new conditions and dramatic changes, etc.
Watch Time: 7 minutes
About the Author
Carlos M Rodriguez is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Quantitative Methods and Director of the Center for the Study of Innovation Management, CSIM, in the College of Business, Delaware State University, USA. He is the KHUB’s Product Design and Development Tools section curator and a collaborator to the Product Development Management Association, PDMA. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Business Research, Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing, European Journal of Innovation Management, Journal of Brand Strategy, Journal of International Marketing, International Marketing Review, Management Decision, Journal of Business and Leadership, Journal of Higher Education Research & Development, Journal of Marketing and Consumer Research among others. Currently, he serves on the editorial board of several journals. His research interests are relationship marketing, branding and customer experiences, product design and innovation, and new product development teams. He recently published the book Product Design and Innovation: Analytics for Decision Making, which is centered on the design techniques and methodologies vital to the product design process. He is engaged in several international educational, research, and academic projects and international professional consulting activities.
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