Products that Last starts where most books on product development end. From the perspective of designers and entrepreneurs, once a product has been designed, produced and sold, it disappears beyond the newness horizon. They are little aware of the opportunities that exist in the next product universe, where money is made from products in use, as well as from a product’s afterlife. These opportunities clearly exist, otherwise they would not be providing an income for so many people. However, to be recognized as segments of a circle of continuous value creation, they need reframing.

112 pages softcover. ISBN/EAN: 978-94-6186-386-7
Authors: Conny Bakker, Marcel den Hollander, Ed van Hinte, Yvo Zijlstra

Products that Last offers readers an innovative and practical methodology to unravel a product’s ‘afterlife’ and systematically scrutinize it for new opportunities. It introduces us to business models that benefit from the opportunities offered by a much longer product life.

Products that Last will change the way entrepreneurs and designers develop and exploit goods, helping to reduce material and energy consumption over time. Nothing more, nothing less.

A throwaway culture has characterised and underpinned Industrial economies for more than half a century. Only recently, however, have governments and researchers begun to pay attention to the short lifespan of many consumer goods, prompted by concern at their wastefulness and a growing awareness that their embedded carbon has implications for climate change, demanding a slower throughput of materials in the economy.

This book is the result of a three-year research effort into the business opportunities and design challenges that prolonged product lifespans may present. A longer product lifespan is a cornerstone of the circular economy, because it helps to slow down the speed of the flow of materials and goods through society, thus reducing waste. It addresses consumption practices, and ‘buys us time’ to figure out ways of closing materials loops.

So how can designers and businesses help shift a systemic paradigm? Donatella Meadows1 offers us some practical advice, ‘You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. You keep speaking and acting, loudly and with conviction, from the new one. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather, you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.”

To produce something with a long lifespan is more or less synonymous with designing for durability. The strategy is obvious, but the way to make it work less so, simply because for many products it has hardly ever been an issue: make sure that it works until the client stops caring that it has ceased to be. And let us not forget gifts. Many a label printer, to take a cliché example, is passed on to someone else in the family, or stashed away somewhere, without even having been unpacked. But still, even in this case its quality is important, just in case the next owner turns out to be a user.

Most designers are not aware of the fact that everything they do is defined by an implicit business model, and that this is virtually always a model to sell products and then ignore them. Even newly graduated designers who have started their own small scale production of handbags or vases, sometimes find out the hard way that they have produced faulty products and that they have to find time to repair returned items. Little attention is given to this in education, and designers have little practical experience with strategies to design products with a long lifespan.

Over 10.000 students worldwide participated and finished this online course that is still running
www.edx.org/course/circular-economy-introduction-delftx-circularx-0
Production: Conny Bakker & Emma Fromberg, TU Delft /
Videoproduction & graphics: Yvo Zijlstra (Antenna-men) / Editing: Arne Verbrugh (Kaina Media) / Music: Charly van Rest (Silent M Studio)

Products that Last  - © 2014 by Conny Bakker, Ed van Hinte, Marcel den Hollander, Yvo Zijlstra
Size 20 x 24 cm / 112 pages Flexcover / Enlish edition: ISBN 978 94 6186 386 7 / Nederlandse editie: 978 90 6369 559 0
Bookdesign, image research, graphics, image editing: Yvo Zijlstra (Antenna-men)

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