Meaningful Stuff
Jonathan Chapman
“Designed things simply provide the wireframe architecture on which we may drape layers of meaningful associations over time.
Impact: ★★★★★
Ease: ★★★☆☆
Novelty: ★★★★★
Concision: ★★★★☆
Practicality: ★★★☆☆
What I like
There are some statistics in the book that were a real eye opener for me, especially as someone working in product.
The way the author illustrates experience, interaction, and meaning changed my perspective a bit on experience design
The author does a nice job of weaving in stories, sources, and academic research to help support arguments- which I found helpful
What’s missing
The chapters are a bit long and inconsistent in length. Some sections carry on for a very long time which can make it bit difficult to read.
Not a lot of action steps for what can be done as an individual designer, more theory, making it hard to understand what to do with info.
Review
What is the true cost of a product? It includes the cost of excavating an object from the earth. It includes the cost of the waste that was disposed of to remove said material from the earth. It includes the cost of transporting an item, manufacturing an item, and of course, delivering it to the end customer for a price. But the cost goes further than that. It might cost someone energy or effort to piece something together, to melt away plastics to access a raw material. As consumers the price we pay is so much more than just the object itself. Truly, we are paying for not just the sausage, but also how the sausage is made. This book, “Meaningful Stuff” is a powerful book. It zooms way out to look at sustainability in product design, challenging wasteful practices over the past century or so. It also investigates the underlying definition of what makes something meaningful, and in turn, makes consumers less likely to waste things that they have built meaningful associations with. The overlying thesis in my mind is that design has prioritized profit over sustainability, causing an Anthropocene, where we as humans are causing irreversible damage to earth. As Chapman eloquently puts it- earth doesn’t need us to save it, it needs protection from us! Chapman pulls multiple, long, powerful chapters together and addresses topics like what it means for a product to age, how companies are creating artificial aging, or “planned obsolescence”, how we might make designs more meaningful, and how we as designers might make systemic impact to confront things like wastefulness.
So what makes something meaningful? Let’s use the humble cup as an example. If a single person were to consume one disposable cup every day for their entire life between the ages of five to eighty, that would equate to about 25,000 cups. But cups hold the same function no matter what the cup is- to contain something, usually a liquid, usually for immediate consumption. So why don’t we just use the same cup for drinking things throughout our lives? Well because we are fickle creatures- we see a used cup as something contaminated. If someone else uses a cup or has the same cup that we do, we perceive it as less special and are more likely to discard it. Meaning happens when an object takes on an association beyond its initial representation through interaction with a person. Perhaps its a coffee mug that our late grandmother gifted to us which makes us continue to use it. To another person that same mug might appear useless, perhaps even disgusting, but to us that object holds meaning- and when an object holds meaning, we prescribe it value that makes us less likely to discard it than if it did not- this is known as Endowment Effect. We also find things to be meaningful that act as an extension of our identities- which is known at the Diderot Effect. These are just a couple of things that add meaning to objects.
While reading this book I took a trip to the United Kingdom to do some research on retail experiences. While seated at a bar after a day of research I overheard a conversation from a guest like myself chatting with a bartender. “Why are you using compostable straws?” they asked. The bartender simply replied, “because our government makes us”. The UK government has taken it upon themselves to regulate how wasteful products are used in crowded environments. Another example is that at sports stadiums, beer vendors must use recyclable cups which are sanitized and reused throughout the course of a game. More people, less cups, regulation. My opinion is that we need similar macro-level regulations in the US that doesn’t punish companies for wasteful practices, but instead incentivizes those who do to the point it would be stupid not to.
Overall I found this book to be a real eye-opener. It delves into topics like interaction design, experience design, product, and wastefulness. There are some incredible stories and statistics in this book that may change your perspective on what takes an object from being novel, perhaps even disposable, into something meaningful and permanent. Meaning is subjective, it changes from one culture or person to another. When something is culturally meaningful, it can become a classic.
Learnings
On a global scale, our capitalist system is predicated on a disregard for longevity, because companies so wider it more profitable to make products that die than to make products that last.-Caroline Haskins
Socially approved patterns shape the way we interact with the material world
Norms are informal understandings that govern individuals’ behavior in society
Modern consumers do not just want easier lives; they want better lives, and more meaningful lives.
Inconvenient and time consuming tasks are certainly not easy or convenient but hold a lot of value
Obsolescence is the practice of making things obsolete intentionally, whether it’s physically or psychologically, in order to generate future sales
Design is an opportunist, adaptive process of continual development, innovation, and emergence
Designed things simply provide the wireframe architecture on which we may drape layers of meaningful associations over time.
“Meaning’ is the relationship that forms between subject and audience (interaction design). Product meaning is dynamic based on social and cultural contexts
Things can hold intrinsic (subjective) and instrumental (objective) value, and keep us as people connected to moments
Culture is the social characteristics and knowledge of a group of people. It is a shared pattern of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and understanding that we learn through the process of socialization.
We have dug around 30 million miles worth of underground tunnels in pursuit of precious resources. For every one ton of product those resources provide, we create 40 tons of waste. Of that one ton of product, 98% gets discarded in first year of use.
Design is a conversation about what to conserve and what to change, a conversation about what we value. It is a process of o serving a situation as having some limitations, reflecting on how and why to improve that situation, and acting to improve it.
The true cost of a product includes everything it took to get the product manufactured and brought to the customer.
Meaning depends on context. All materials have meaning. All materials interact with their context of use, and, through this interaction, elicit meaningful associations within the mind of their user.
Experience is constituted via the dynamic and continually changing interrelationship between people and their environment.
Emotions pull us toward certain people, objects, actions, and ideas while pulling us away from others.
Experience, like fire, is not a thing, it is a process, an unfolding - Ian Mcgilchrist
What we believe about a given thing powerfully affects our experience of it, and the positive or negative nature of our experience influences the positive or negative character of our actions and their outcomes. A charm is lucky if you wish it to be so.
The meaningful associations we form with designed things are deeply unstable and are powerfully influenced by both rational and irrational phenomena
With objects, endurance tends not to be about “will” but instead refers to an ability to withstand harsh and challenging external forces. Endurance is subjectively measured against how long that thing ordinarily lasts.
Products can be designed to age gracefully, even spectacularly. Japanese wabi-sabi: Wabi is the quality of a rustic yet refined solitary beauty. Sabi is the trait, be it the green corrosion of bronze or the pattern of moss and lichen on wood and stone, that comes with weathering and age. As a design sensibility, wabi-sabi helps bring our attention closer to a more authentic materials experience by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.
Classics are temporal nodes anchored in time. Pursuit of ahistorical and timeless "design classics" is a perilous endeavor for those looking to design products that last. The very attempt of taking objects immortal, of making them simply last ‘longer’ rather than last 'meaningfully’ in their sheer perfection and everlasting completeness, casts them outside of time, making them somewhat unrelatable as things.
The "Diderot effect" describes this unstable, relativist character of our relationships with objects. We are drawn to things that reflect our unfolding identities. It therefore follows that the products one acquires will be somehow complementary to one another, as each object has been selected based on a similar set of identity-matching criteria.
Interaction design is a way of framing the ongoing relationships between people and the worlds they inhabit, a way of framing the intent of all design.
Services are dynamic processes with an emphasis on what you do (verbs), not fixed and static things known for what they are. (noun)
Endowment Effect: we place value on things because we have ownership in them. Contamination: we devalue things when we feel they have been contaminated by others, the environment, etc.
Using together and making together provides a vital context for collaboration.
Designing more meaningful stuff helps wean people off their relentless lust for the new and shapes new sustainable business models with the potential to transform the way customers engage with the world of goods.
Systems are unified conglomerations of interdependent parts, delineated by their spatial and temporal boundaries, influenced by their environments. By applying the right kinds of leverage to specific points in a system, design can encourage change. Donella Meadows
The cognitive practice of zooming in and out of the general and the particular is a necessary condition for designers who are looking to enable systems-level change: an agile mind, capable of shifting scale from micro to macro, and thinking in a manner that considers the impacts of each design move, as the creative process unfolds.