IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

own weight to manufacture such an object. Why own one, if I can get
ahold of one when I need it? A product-service system provides me with
access to the products, tools, opportunities, and capabilities I need to get
the job done—namely, power tools for me to use, but not own.
Service design is about arranging things so that people who need things
done are connected to other people and equipment that get things done—
on an as- and when-needed basis. The technical term, which comes from
the logistics industry, is ‘‘dynamic resource allocation in real time.’’ Agricultural
cooperatives that purchase tractors and sell their use-time to associates
are well-known examples, but once one starts looking, examples
spring up everywhere: a home delivery service for detergents in Italy, a mobile
laboratory for industrial users of lubricants in Germany, dozens of carsharing
schemes, an organic vegetable subscription system in Holland. 34
Industrial ecologists François Jégou and Ezio Manzini found enough examples
to fill a book, Sustainable Everyday: A Catalogue of Promising Solutions, 35
which is filled with novel daily life services that they discovered around the
world. These are ‘‘planning activities whose objective is a system,’’ Manzini
told me. Hundreds of services suitable for a resource-limited, complex, and
fluid world are being developed by grassroots innovators: those that enable
people to take care of other people, work, study, move around, find food,
eat, and share equipment.
Examples of extended homes and cohousing are emerging in many
countries, for example. The integration of private and common space is enabling
the creation of communities of people who choose to live together
on the basis of shared facilities such as kitchens, laundries, do-it-yourself
workrooms, children’s play areas, guest rooms, gardens, and garden tools.
In Hong Kong, the majority of recent buildings have been constructed
to incorporate this kind of sharing. A wide range of neighborhood multiservice
centers has been opened in various cities: a bookshop that houses
a bar and cultural center (Tikkun, Milan), a bakery that offers space for
the preparation and refrigeration of food (Cottage Baker, Rugby, England),
a grocery shop that offers meetings and study courses (Nature Ride,
Milan). 36
Lightness 19
My favorite example of a light product-service system is telephone
voice mail services. When my wife and I first moved in together, we discovered
that we owned, between us, seven stand-alone telephone answering
machines. Only one of these actually worked; the rest were awaiting repair