NOTE: this post was originally written for the P2P Foundation blog on September 22nd 2010, but since it’s a quite interesting issue and its contents fit within openp2pdesign.org, I republished it here. The original post is here: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/design-in-the-age-of-sharing/2010/09/22
01. Sharing by Design
A recent post on Shareable made me think about how the culture of Sharing has been changing the discipline of Design after the success of Open Source and the Web 2.0.
We are researching and discussing how we can bring collaboration into design processes and how we can use design processes to foster collaboration, but what about developing design projects for facilitating the sharing of physical goods?
Keara Schwartz wrote a post on Shareable, trying to start a conversation about this issue; however, that post is not really deep and inspiring since she finds that the only barrier to sharing products is the lack of trust in other people we have in sharing physical products. According to Keara Schwartz, we can share digital information easily, but not physical goods as well because we don’t believe other people will take care of them as we would do; she then suggest that products might be designed differently in order to facilitate their sharing.
I believe though that this is not the point: we don’t share products because our socio-economic system has developed in that direction, not because products are not designed for being shared. And designing for facilitating the sharing has wider (and older) implications.
Nonetheless, that post is a good starting point in order to think about the issue of Design for Sharing: we have to notice that Shareable is a nonprofit online magazine that “tells the story of sharing, covering the people, places, and projects bringing a shareable world to life”. And its tagline is Sharing by Design, implying that sharing can be enabled with design.
02. Access by Design
We could argue now that we are entering into the Age of Sharing, since after the success of Open Source and of Web 2.0 new terms, theories, technologies, products and services that are based on the concept of sharing (and collaboration) are increasingly introduced. But these trends started before, though a little bit different, as Jeremy Rifkin clearly explained in his book The Age of Access:
In the hypercapitalist economy, buying things in markets and owning property become outmoded ideas, while “just-in-time” access to nearly every kind of service, through vast commercial networks operating in cyberspace, becomes the norm. We increasingly pay for the experience of using things-in the form of subscriptions, memberships, leases, and retainers-rather than for the things themselves. [...]
Rifkin argues that the capitalist journey, which began with the commodification of goods and the ownership of property, is ending with the commodification of human time and experience.
As Rifkin noted, the transition from owning products to accessing them through a service started long time before the rise of the Web 2.0; it is therefore a longer trend coming from the evolution of society and economy. Design for Access came before Design for Sharing. Design, and especially Product Design, in the Age of Access means above all Product Stewardship, a concept developed as a Design for Sustainability effort with the aim of involving all the stakeholders of the life cycle of a product. With this approach, we ask all the stakeholders to take shared responsibility for the impacts to human health and the natural environment that result from the manufacturing, use, and end-of-life management of products. If we want to just access a product instead of owning it (and maybe the service is built upon its sharing it with other people), we need a lot of different players that actually manage it through its life cycle.
Product stewardship is a concept whereby environmental protection centers around the product itself, and everyone involved in the lifespan of the product is called upon to take up responsibility to reduce its environmental impact. For manufacturers, this includes planning for, and if necessary, paying for the recycling or disposal of the product at the end of its useful life. This may be achieved, in part, by redesigning products to use fewer harmful substances, to be more durable, reuseable and recyclable, and to make products from recycled materials. For retailers and consumers, this means taking an active role in ensuring the proper disposal or recycling of an end-of-life product.
Accessing a product, instead of owning it, means that the traditional life cycle of a product has to change and to be shared among all its stakeholders. Design for Access and for Sharing is more about new processes than new product typologies and technologies: it could be a way to design more proper and sustainable products (like the Universal Design / Design for All approaches). (more…)
