Transcript for EO403 - Future Sustainable Approaches.PDF

Graduate Apprenticeship - Engineering Design and Manufacture Class: EO403 - Design for X Future Sustainable Approaches In this video, we're going to look at a few future sustainable approaches to product development. For example, sustainable user-centred design. This is an emerging area of work, and...

Graduate Apprenticeship - Engineering Design and Manufacture Class: EO403 - Design for X Future Sustainable Approaches In this video, we're going to look at a few future sustainable approaches to product development. For example, sustainable user-centred design. This is an emerging area of work, and it looks at how people perceive and act and behave with regards to things like environmental issues, products, technologies, and so on. It considers people situated in various cultural or technological contexts and how they relate to sustainability. It's very early work, it's emerging research work, and it's not fully mainstream in industry yet, but certainly, young designers, young companies are thinking about this type of approach. There is a good case study in sustainable user-centred design from Static, a research project from Sweden. The researchers wanted to make energy visible and tangible to all our senses. They wanted to express the relationship between different forms of energy, energy use, and to make us think about our energy behaviour over time. They created and developed a number of examples of products of this type. The Power-Aware Cord and Disappearing-Pattern Tiles are two such products. The Power-Aware Cord is a cable on a device which shows us by glowing in the dark how much energy is being used and whether a product is on or off. The Disappearing-Pattern Tiles is a product that was developed to make us aware of how much hot water we were using whilst showering. The longer the shower was used and the more hot water was being used, the more the pattern disappeared on the interior of the shower. So all these products were sending messages to the users of the product to make them aware of the amount of energy, how much was being used, and when it was being used. Another form of sustainable user-centred design is emotionally-durable design, and this is to make us hold on to our products longer in an environment and a society where the next version, customization, and so on, is becoming so popular. Emotional-durable design is an example of sustainable user-centred design. It argues that there's a mismatch between the emotional lifespan of the products that we use and the actual ecological lifespan of products. And what designers are trying to do with emotionally-durable relationships is to increase that length of time that we hold on to products. There is a good book on emotionally durable design by Jonathan Chapman if you're interested in looking at this particular sustainable approach further. So as a product developer, as a designer, what would you do to include sustainable product development within your designing process? Page 1/2 Page 2/2