Those guys busted my head grounding all the conversation around real business opportunities. No art was discussed. To some extend the conversation diverged from my topic, but on the other end, that was what I was looking for, a fresh sight on the research from a practical point of view.
I introduced the topic, asking the guys to focus on the value of objects, in the sense of the relationship that the consumers have with them. I wanted to explore this relationship and possible way to enhance it in order to increase the time consumers want to keep an electronic object. The first step in the exploration was about focusing on defining properly the object life cycle.
Cecilia added a couple of bricks to my initial schematization:
Go Green!
Factors as transportation, energy and waste should be considered as relevant at each step of the process and became crucial in the design step (as stuff you should consider while designing) and at the buying step (where they can became an added value to the product). I’m sure that “go green” is a chapter inside most of the business strategy plan of big companies. But there are still a lot of problem with green products. Are they actually green? They act as a relief to the climate burden that each of us has to carry, but it is right to be relieved?
Customization
Mass customization can be another way to add value to an object. The object become co-designed by the customer itself and in this way a closer relationship might emerge. For reflections about this topic here it is an article I wrote some months ago about Fluid Forms a design studio that is exploring the new possibilities that mass customization offer from a product design perspective.
Thinking about customization for electronic product is not that easy. Customize a circuit in a mass production system is very hard, from a purely technical point of view. But if we think about a circuit as a bottom layer on top of which we have an electronic API then it become possible to think about customizing the interface and the casing of the object itself.
Personalize and customize items are still very expensive, and they are luxury items DNA-wise.
The obvious solutions
There’s an obvious relation between the price, the value and the quality of a product. You can choose to buy a perfect hand shaped dress or an H&M one. The first one will fit you perfectly and will, hopefully, last a long time. The second one will be poorly sewed and maiden, but it’s also so cheap that allow you to buy another one whenever you want. People wants instant satisfaction, and they want it over and over again.
One obvious way to increase the perceived value of an object is rise its price. And another obvious way its to increase his lifespan, that is particularly relevant for technological objects that are normally designed to last a defined amount of time, to increase sells. But short lifespan is not the only reason why we thrash electronics: another big problem is obsolescence. We thrash a tech product when it became obsolete to buy a new fancy one.
Some picture of the dinner:
