Why are consumer behaviour and care important to sustainable building design?
Design fuelling overconsumption
In recent centuries, consumers have pursued new luxuries to match a higher status consumer until, over time, it becomes normal, everyday, and humdrum even. What was once a luxury, becomes a necessary consumer good, like a colour tv, a smartphone, or fashionable architectural features. Then these items need to be replaced to match the higher status consumer again and the cycle repeats over and over. People consume more and more. This process was first noted in the 1800s, but these slight shifts over decades, have now exponentially built up to a point, in the early twenty-first century, where even durable household furniture is regularly marketed in catalogues and magazines as ‘seasonal’ to psychologically drive ever more consumption. In a time of climate crisis, it seems hard to believe that the marketing world is encouraging aesthetic obsolescence of long-lasting goods.
Design practice and industry have partly fed this consumption and production cycle, by developing built-in obsolescence of desirability, function, and the technological. 'Featuritis', a term coined by design guru Don Norman, is the design approach to constantly add functions that appear more convenient or better, but are rarely used or needed, or incorporating aesthetic choices such as irreparable or delicate surfaces that don’t last. We see this not only in the design of technological goods but also at times, in our built environment. This approach stimulates a short-term desire for objects, but relatively quickly, interest wanes, or the items wear out quickly and the consumption cycle continues.
Shifting towards sustainable design and sustainable consumption
However, by looking at the flip side, if designers have fuelled the desire for ever more luxury and new fashions, can we also design our way out of this problem? Can designers embed an object with characteristics that promote long-term love and appreciation over time? Can designers help reduce overall consumption and production? Can we encourage a long-term valuing of things over short-term luxury?
Whilst this approach may have the most impact on industrial design, it is also important for architecture and the urban environment to be designed for long-term consumer love, to extend the built form’s lifespan as much as possible, for maximum environmental benefits.
Sustainable design approaches of the built environment have generally focussed on measurable approaches such as life cycle thinking and analysis, leadership in energy and environmental design (LEED), cradle-to-cradle, carbon footprint analysis, circular design, and green star ratings to name a few. Industry’s response to environmental issues has largely focused on 'less damage' and symptom-based approaches. While this has validity, we are seeing a growing shift towards regenerative design which seeks to ‘reverse damage’. This is a great development, but I think we have still forgotten a crucial element.
Many environmentally sustainable design (ESD) policies exist, but rarely address emotional disconnection and disposal practices, thus failing to address the whole problem. This failure to address consumption practices is palpable in the ‘rebound effect,’ that is when consumption increases overall due to perceived environmental gains in other purchasing decisions of new items, which deliver energy-efficient design or lower carbon footprint. While material and production aspects of ESD have been extensively debated and solutions proposed, discussion on shifting consumer behaviour toward retaining artefacts or sustainable consumption is lacking in the design field. This is partly responsible for the over-consumption phenomenon and has driven my practice. When I work on projects, I consider ways in which the architectural element or public art installations can create value, connection, and worth beyond just initial aesthetic engagement and interest. I ask myself, how it can have a long-term interest and create empathy or care?
“Caring for objects can be a way of caring for that larger object that is our planet”
Extending object lifespan
What I am interested in and explored in my PhD, is the way we can reduce carbon footprint by extending object lifespan, while acknowledging this is a very difficult or even impossible thing to measure. Despite this, it is still important. By understanding consumer behaviour and attitudes towards objects, designers can find ways to extend object life spans by tapping into what makes people retain, restore and care for their built environment. Because if it is not regenerative, we probably need to consume less of it regardless of how ‘green’ it is, which means having objects that last, both physically in terms of being well made and functional, but also lasting emotionally, so we continue to care for it and repair it. And research shows if consumers care for it emotionally, it is more likely to be cared for physically and kept as long as possible.
There have been past design movements that have contributed ideas on the aesthetics of the ‘timeless’ or ‘universal’ built environment artefacts that don’t stylistically date. An aesthetic approach to make things last longer. But it is evident from the sheer increase in consumption, production and waste produced by the built environment and design industries, that in practice this approach has been naïve. An aesthetic solution does not drive retainment, as I discovered through anthropological research on collecting and interviews with collectors. I will explain the problems with ‘timeless universal’ design further in another post, but the assumption within design discourse that universal and ‘classic’ artefacts are necessarily enduring is, in many ways, insufficient.
Look at any verge collection and you can still see piles of simple, “timeless” still functioning designs tossed out. Often it is due to poor quality making, but equally often it is in good condition or able to be repaired, but clearly, it is not deemed to be worth keeping or repairing. So how do we make people care enough to retain and repair?
Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair and living well with nature.
By looking at the relationship between the person and the object to see what people do keep and why we can discover ways of creating a deep connection to maintain relevance and meaning across generations.
Just as the design industry has encouraged throwaway attitudes through the design of artefacts, designers can perhaps also find ways to better satisfy longer-term needs and encourage consumers to care longer for their built environment artefacts. Through interviews, surveys, and research of what people keep and care for, and what is deemed worthy of custodianship or handing on to others, I developed twelve design approaches that can inform an ’Enduring Design Framework’.
An enduring design approach
The twelve characteristics of my enduring design framework include designing for bodily accordance, empathic visual relations, kinship and self-relatedness, self-actualisation, community connectedness, framed provenance, narrative, user interaction, enchantment (aesthetics and craftsmanship), liveliness, aging (gracefully), and evolving physical transformation.
Although not all of these twelve characteristics are possible in every project (or indeed for the built environment, as some are more suited to consumer objects), it is drawn from consumer behaviour and psychological research, surveys and interviews with collectors, and anthropological studies. It provides for me at least, a sound guide grounded in evidence-based research for designing architectural elements and public art that have a better chance at being loved by the community and users over time. These approaches can be used in conjunction with more measurable sustainable building design principles to enhance the sustainability of a design, despite not being able to be quantified.
As designers of the built environment, be it building designers, architects, interior designers, or public artists, we need to understand and direct a real shift in consumer attitudes and emotion to material objects, so what we make (or already have), is better cared for, loved even, and valued enough to be restored rather than replaced. Here there is a significant opportunity to reduce overall consumption.
Built environment designers need to connect to the emotions of the user to encourage responsible consumption behaviour. Which is what I love about making public art. It adds emotion, narrative, and experiences that encourage and relationship with the built form that is not only more meaningful but can evoke love and care for a place. I’ve already spoken about evoking kinship in an earlier post, but I will go through the other twelve characteristics of my enduring design framework in future posts as well.
Quote from: Manzini, Ezio. 1995. "Prometheus of the Everyday: The Ecology of the Artificial and the Designer's Responsibility." In Discovering Design; Exploration in Design Studies, edited by Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin, pg 239.