IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

18 Chapter 1
use them. This is how a commitment to sustainability drives innovation.
When organizations put design at the heart of product and service development,
they are triggered to ask fundamental questions about what they
make, how they make it, and who for. 32 End-to-end system integration closes
energy and matter loops. Design thinking, in combination with Internetenabled
networks and wireless communications, can reshape whole production
processes, even the entire logic and structure of an industry.
Design has achieved critical mass in many industries—if not cultural
visibility—because it looks at ways to make products less wasteful of materials,
less polluting, and easier to recycle. If the so-called green design
approach (better known in the United States as ‘‘design for the environment’’)
has a limitation, it is that it intervenes at the ‘‘end of the pipe.’’ It
modifies individual products or services but does not transform the industrial
process as a whole.
Use, Not Own
Structural changes to whole systems, in the way markets are organized, in
the way our transport infrastructures are organized and used, and in the
way we work and live, are the hardest changes to effect. But just such
changes in these areas are already under way. The shift to a service-based
economy is one of the most important features of this transition. Think of
your mobile phone. You may have paid fifty dollars for the handset—or
maybe you got it free. Either way, you probably pay hundreds of dollars
for calls and services each year—and those, to all intents and purposes,
are immaterial in the sense that you do not need to purchase or use a
new device each time you make a call. Many of us already lease, rather
than purchase, a device as part of a service contract—a car, a refrigerator,
an answering machine, a photocopier. In so doing, we purchase
performance—moving, cooling, message taking, or copying—rather than
the product itself. Companies are finding, today, that by switching from
simply selling a product to selling the optimal performance of a product,
they obtain significant financial rewards through, among other things,
increasing resource productivity. 33 The trend is to supply enabling platforms
rather than stand-alone devices.
Power tools are another example. The average consumer power tool is
used for ten minutes in its entire life—but it takes hundreds of times its