An interesting fact: celluloid, one of the first commercial plastics, was introduced in the middle of the 19th Century as a replacement for ivory. It is an interesting producer choice that was enforced by a shortage of elephant tusks.

 

This fact illustrates the fate of change. Changes, innovations and product improvements nearly always arrive in the guise of the familiar. Human imagination is insufficient to adopt entirely unknown solutions.

 

Because of that it is a great challenge to develop new products and services and an even greater challenge to sell them. Most difficult of all however is to change consumer behaviour, for instance in the realm of health or environmental pollution.

 

Consumer choice based upon reason is an article of cut-and-dried marketer faith. Indeed everybody loves to have a choice. On the other hand nobody actually likes to go through the tedious process of choosing, which takes time and attention and still is intuitive rather than rational. We tend to like what we feel we already know and a lot of that is available in shops. As a matter of fact the sheer abundance now is reducing our own chance to survive on Earth in the long run. The rich part of the world suffers from cultural obesity.

 

The current economic system lacks the ability to define the cost of all the things this planet has to offer: water, air, materials, and life, including previous life in the form of fossil fuels. At the same time marketers are inclined to subject all choices to impulse controlled consumer preferences.

 

Whether this is just is open to discussion, to say the least.

 

If, for instance, recyclability or farm animal health was simply a rule and not a matter of consumer choice, some argue that this would amount to consumer patronisation, others see this objection as an attempt to avoid responsibility.

 

The entrepreneur is always the initiator of new products and therefore the first one to choose. He can choose not to fulfil certain demands. Moreover, choice between various grades of environmental harmlessness is not very interesting for consumers to make. Consumers individually care about convenience, familiarity, quality and price within the limited context of daily life. Long term consequences should be part of standard quality principles to be trusted rather than favoured by consumers. If this would render products more expensive that would do justice to environmental costs.

 

Familiarity and understanding are key factors in consumer choice. Raymond Loewy, one of the first true industrial designers, called this the MAYA principle (MAYA being the acronym of Most Advanced Yet Acceptable).

 

Being interested in dematerialisation as a way to reduce material and energy consumption I have worked on a project to find ways to extend product life. It was called Eternally Yours. For the same reason I am now starting up a new foundation called Lightness Studios. In both projects consumer behaviour is supposed to slowly change by what is newly offered in terms of products. Interestingly, however, the approach is different in each project.

 

In the former we concluded that style is not relevant to the time products remain in use. Otherwise there would be no justification for the existence of antiques. Furthermore the most important drive of change is technological development, which is not a bad thing since generally it does result in increasing environmental efficiency. The main conclusion was that a concept should be 'evolvable', a term now popular in airliner engineering. It means that a product should be able to incorporate improvements by replacing parts or elements rather than the whole product. 

 

Lightness Studios aims to stimulate weight reduction for just about everything, beginning with buildings. Light structures are characterised by a strong emphasis on function, materials and the way in which they are processed and of course by an unfamiliar lack of weight. The most important challenge in this project is to 'dress up' lightness in such a way that it will be perceived as trustworthy. For design this implies nothing less than a paradigm turnover. Whereas designers and particularly architects traditionally try to provide heavy things with a light expression they will now have to learn to think the other way around. The opposite kind of disguise will have to convince the consumer to get accustomed to a different setting.

 

 

Ed van Hinte is an industrial designer, author and design commentator based in the Netherlands.