News

Learn to love your possessions

Published 21 January 2013

Fall in love with your trainers or become best buddies with your microwave oven – new thinking in design being pioneered at the University of Brighton aims at developing products with "emotional durability".

Jonathan Chapman, Professor of Sustainable Design in the Faculty of Arts, believes that the key is to design products that are longer lasting, upgradeable and that are made with materials that last in both a physical and emotional sense.

His research was featured recently in The Guardian: Time for new business models based on durable design?.

The aim, he said, is to make people want to keep products longer and to repair them when they break instead of throwing them away and replacing them. He calls this concept 'emotionally durable design', and argues that it will help slow consumerism, combat global warming and conserve scarce resources.

Professor Chapman's research looks at reducing toxic and environmentally-destructive e-waste such as computers, TVs, MP3 players, and mobile phones which are quickly thrown away and replaced and which account for over one million tonnes of poisonous electronic waste per year in the UK alone.

As part of his consulting role on these issues, he is working with the sportswear giant Puma and was recently at the company's London headquarters hosting seminars attended by representatives of global brands including Marks & Spencer, Adidas, ASOS and Dragon Rouge.

He and fellow speakers described new ways of working in design and production including zero waste pattern cutting, low chemical impacts, and psychological design tools, and the emotional durability concept.

Nick Gant, lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, called the concept "growing old gracefully" and pointed to a pair of shoes designed and produced by second-year University of Brighton student Emma Whiting. The shoes reveal a hidden pattern when they fade with age, and pick up dirt and grime, so the longer you own them the more the product develops."

Emma Whiting with her shoes

Another example is Stain Tea Cups by University of Brighton graduate Laura Bethan Wood. The cups have been designed to evolve and improve through the passing of time, violating fixed-ideas around the assumption that use, and wear-and-tear, is damaging to a product.

Professor Chapman said: "Rejections of perfectly functional items are common, and can be seen in examples such as a hairline scratch on the otherwise pristine screen of an iPhone, or a stubborn speck of oil on a grey cotton shirt. The marks and patina accrued through use are seldom associated with an increase in value and meaning.

Stain Tea Cups by Laura Bethan Wood

"In the case of the delicate white porcelain teacups, the interior surface of the cup is treated so as to stain more in predetermined places (some parts are glazed and others left unglazed). The more the cups are used, the more the pattern is revealed. Over time they will build up an individual pattern dependent on the user's personal way of drinking tea.

"Change, and the impermanence of all things has forever troubled us humans – that whispered taunt, just beneath the level of awareness, that reminds us of our own mortality, and that of all things on earth. As streams of matter and energy flow continuously in and out of each other, we realise that the one constant in all of this is change itself. The more we attempt to overcome this fact, the less in tune with natural processes our thinking becomes, and the more alien our resulting practices become. Yet we need not stop at accepting change, but rather, we should embrace and celebrate it."

Professor Chapman, who is currently in talks with Puma regarding ongoing and future sustainability design projects with the university, challenged why many people throw products away simply because they are scratched or cracked, and proposed a new ethos: "A lot of my work in terms of emotional durable design is asking how we can design products and experiences in a way that make them last, to extend the longevity of objects, not for ever but for just that little bit extra, to make fairly significant reductions in the consumption and waste of materials and energy, and may be even add a little bit more satisfaction and happiness into this system."

Professor Chapman told the company representatives: "The only way the situation will change is by you staying in design and by you continuing to produce but to do it in a different way and to ensure that this Darwinian process of continual production is based on a new value system and set of goals and directions. By doing that you will be presenting people, consumers, with a broader range of choices and through that, change will occur."