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Sustainability Through Resource Efficiency: Focus on the Toast, Not the Toaster
While the object fetishism of this era has somewhat eroded this statement's validity, I often find myself repeating the design-school mantra drummed into my head: "People don't want toasters. What they want is toast."
Howard J. Brown is the founder of dMass, a consultancy that focuses on "reduction through design" and integrating environmentalism with business. A guy like Brown understands the no-toaster concept well. In this video below, which is fascinating despite being rendered in primitive cartoon style, the same concept (though worded differently) is presented to a manufacturer of objects in an effort to place them on the right—and profitable—track for the future.
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This is the focus of a master's program that I have helped to start: MSPI - Master's in Sustainable Product-Service System Innovation - www.bth.se/mspi
The point of MSPI is to teach people how to do exactly as you say, and "focus on the toast, not the toaster"... and to explore this is done from both a business development and an engineering perspective. I.e. how do we co-develop tangible products and intangible services in order to best deliver the desired function AND what kind of business model supports that approach?
On the topic of sustainability, though - we must be careful! It's not only about resource efficiency. Resource availability is certainly one of those important things, HOWEVER... we sometimes get too caught up in being efficient, that we forget to look at other opportunities. Energy for example... there's so much talk about energy efficiency. And, of course, generally energy efficiency is a good thing because the way that our current systems provide energy are largely associated with negative environmental impacts. But we forget that there's oodles and oodles of solar energy coming to earth every day, and if we can substitute passive solar for other energy forms, then we can use as much passive solar as we want... i.e. not be "efficient", but have lower environmental impacts.
As society refines engineering and manufacturing practices... this higher level of resolution in the details of how we define success become increasingly important.