The world Economy is only 9.1% circular
Harald Friedl
After listening to this talk it became clear to me that in an ideal future; the linear economy will be looked back upon as one of humans many learning failures. The thought of extracting raw materials from the earth and turning them into an object which is destined to be wasted will be utterly absurd.
Our dream is that products are never thrown away anymore.
Gerrard Street
We want to live in a world where waste can be the input of your product.
Psychological ownership is a mental state reached when an individual claims an object as theirs. We can design object attachment. It is directly related to interaction and experience design, where through affordances and signifiers designers are able to craft pleasurable experiences. Experiences can’t be designed but we can design for an intended experience through the use of affordances (Pucillo and Cascini). An affordance is a possible interaction enabled by the relationship between physical properties of an object and the capabilities & constraints of the individual interacting. (Don Norman)
The theory behind psychological ownership is useful to understand because it is important to know how and why people form attachments with objects. Fundamentally, there are three main attributes that an object has that lead to a psychologicall owned item. Motives (be-goals), Routes and affordances (do-goals), and actions (motor-goals).
Routes to ownership. As in attractive qualities of an object that make you want to own it. Likewise there are deterrents from ownership, causing people not to want them. Routes to ownership can also be broken into three categories.
The ability to own is limited by how much the object allows the user to own. Which is why the object needs to be designed to be owned. Using the AEIOU contextual inquiry framework (Wasson 2000) the study produced 16 data patterns that have been abstracted into affordance principles. The 16 affordance principles that map a route to psychological ownership are as follows (translated normal speak)
Control
Intimate Knowledge
Self-Investment
Above is the AEIOU researching framework.
“is a coding structure mnemonic used to organise data under the following sections: Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects and Users. The framework can be applied as-is or customised and adapted into a new taxonomy. In both cases, the goal of using this framework is to make interpreting and analysing data easier, while visually mapping the significant relationships and interactions between categories.”
http://dlrtoolkit.com/aeiou/
Every bike here clearly has a story and something that has happened to it. Does this make it less desirable. It would certainly give someone who is riding it less psychological ownership. If you were the one who put the sticker or the paint on the bike the perhaps you would have more psychological ownership over it? The sticker is actually a Soundcloud artists. This is a link to their music https://soundcloud.com/nikauthebro It’s pretty cool and I enjoyed it.
A prosumer is a person who consumes and produces a product. A consumer who becomes involved with designing or customizing products for their own needs
Wikipedia
Using this term in the space of designing products for longevity will be good because collaborating with the consumer and designing a product for the consumer will be more beneficial for both ends of the spectrum.
To test out my thoughts and to provide an answer to myself as to whether or not anyone can fix a phone I brought my old phone back to life. I purchased an inexpensive set of tools from ebay, online and a new battery from down a phone repair store at the bottom of Cuba Street. Using the instructions from ifixit.com I revived my old phone. Above are some photographs of the process.
The phone can now be redistributed as a: working, preowned, refurbished, iPhone 5s.
I am honestly proud of myself. It means that tinkering isn’t over. Like an old car these things can have a life. Used phones shouldn’t live a short life. They can live a second or even third life. We can be less wasteful by prolonging the life of products; we just need to learn more and be willing to try.
This week’s design sprint was tough. We had to solve our research project in just one week. Having not yet done much research in why we care about objects I was a bit stuck. I ended up with a concept that wasn’t informed by my research at all which immediately meant there was nothing backing my presentation.
Moving forward it is clear that I’m on to something. As Tim Parkin said, “the fact that you can’t think what the answer is yet means you’re going to come up with something new and innovative”. Which I think is quite exciting and encouraging.
This weekend I’m going to ride an Onzo and see what it’s like. I’m going to do some research into my competition. I’m also going to look in to shared things that work and find out why they don’t get problems.
Below is an extract from an essay I wrote last year about a pair of shoes, Allbirds. I decided to look back on it because the text that I am interpreting explores the idea of ‘things’ telling stories about people and why we own things.
Anthropologist Daniel Miller’s book, the Comfort of Things, is an ethnographic study of thirty people on a single street in London, spaced over a period of 17 months. It talks about how people express themselves through their possessions and how their items can tell the story of their lives. (Miller, 1) The first chapter tells the story of an old man named George who lives very minimally. His house isn’t decorated and it can be described as “disorienting” due to the basic lack of anything other than furniture. (Miller, 8) Miller elaborates on the story of the man’s life and explains how his lifeless life is reflected through the absence of possessions. Miller makes an interesting point when he says “The closer our relationships are with objects, the closer our relationships are with people”. (Miller, 1) What he means by this is our everyday possessions become an archive of artefacts that reflect the way we are and shares an insight into experiences we have had throughout our lives. The closer we are to these objects, or the more sentimental value they have, suggests a high engagement with the world and the people in it. Using George as an example, his absence of things showcases a scarcity of experiences he has had in his life and thus the lack of people he has had to share them with.
Miller talks about possessions as though they are a form of language and a way to communicate. Conversations are filtered, and somewhat defensive or restrictive, whereas objects can’t lie, they are, in a way, a form of expression. (Miller, 2) An artefact like a low-carbon-footprint pair of shoes (Allbirds), becomes, when you wear it, a statement that you care about the environment. By wearing the shoes, the wearer is communicating through the shoes that they care about the environment. As a matter of fact, I do care about the environment. Although when I purchased the shoes I didn’t think “I hope people think I care about the environment when I wear these”. Upon discovering that Allbirds was made from ethical materials and had a low carbon footprint it only made me want to buy them more because I hold such things in a high regard. By investing a considerable amount of money in a pair of Allbirds, suggests that ethical clothing and having a low carbon footprint is important to me. Therefore, wearing the shoes communicates a care for the environment whether I am conscious of this or not.
I wonder if you can have a high engagement with the world while owning less. For example, when we share things people will be owning less and therefore we will be ‘further away from these artefacts. Does this mean we have a lesser engagement with the world. Is owning less necessarily a bad thing? Does this mean we still need to own some things?
James's Major Project 