Examination of Witnesses (Questions 395-399)
Miss Holly McCain, Miss Lizzie Dutton, Mr Mark Adams
and Dr Jonathan Chapman
5 FEBRUARY 2008
Q395 Chairman: Good afternoon. I
think you were in for the last session so you will have seen the
way we operate. We will try and get through things a little more
quickly because at one o'clock people's tummies start rumbling
or they have other excuses to leave. Perhaps you could introduce
yourselves.
Dr Chapman: I am Jonathan Chapman. I am a Senior
Lecturer at the University of Brighton.
Mr Adams: Mark Adams. I am the Managing Director
of Vitsoe, a furniture company. We are that elusive SME that you
were looking for in the previous session!
Miss Dutton: I am Lizzie Dutton from De Montfort
University's RED Initiative, an East Midlands Development Agency-funded
business support programme.
Miss McCain: My name is Holly McCain. I am also
from De Montfort University's Resource Efficient Design Initiative.
We work with SMEs on a government funded programme.
Q396 Lord Crickhowell: One approach
to reduce waste involves making products more durable and encouraging
consumers to keep them for longer, thus buying less. However,
this does not present an obvious benefit for most manufacturers.
Should designers do more to encourage this process? On the other
hand, we had written evidence from the Ecodesign Centre Wales
that better design generally perpetuates consumption through creating
cycles of dissatisfaction, eg latest model and latest functionality,
so there was a conflict there. When I was a minister I used to
visit Panasonic and Sony's electronics teams in Japan and one
saw an interesting example there. I went successive years and
you would often see the latest product which you realised was
going to replace entirely the previous product. The company very
often held up the introduction for longer than you would have
expected. The small video camera was held up for a couple of years
because they did not want to destroy the market that they had
just created for the large video camera and the investment that
they had put in it. On the one hand, yes, manufacturing for the
duration is the right thing to do. The old types of refrigerator
that you bought before the War and one found still in one's kitchen
30 years later had obvious advantages over a modern product which
perhaps only lasts a couple of years. Would you comment on the
general issue of durability versus the obvious opposite?
Dr Chapman: Firstly, I think the evidence put
forward by the Ecodesign Centre Wales reinforces the idea of longer
lasting objects because it identifies really well the problem,
which is that at present and for the last century the conventional
model of design, production and consumption has been newer, sell
more, waste quicker, buy more and so on. I think it is only very
recently that we have begun to see that this is considerably far
from sustainable and that is why we are sitting here having this
discussion. To question that model of capitalist activity in which
the quantity of products bought and sold equates to the quality
of life and wellbeing, that is societal wellbeing in addition
to ecological wellbeing, is fundamentally flawed. To then consider
how design can play a role in looking at alternative ways of designing,
producing, selling and using a product is incredibly valid. Product
life extension is one way of reducing the consumption of resources—the
consumption of energy through manufacturing, shipping and distribution—but
indeed does imply an equivalent reduction in turnover. A lot of
research, including that of the likes of Walter Stahel, who I
am sure a lot of you are aware of, the Swiss industrial analyst
and Director of the Product Life Institute in Geneva, looks at
the "service economy" which does indeed engage with
the design of products, but it uses the product more as a means
to develop links with consumers so that economic models of servicing
and upgrade and repair can be fostered over greater periods of
time. So you may indeed sell less units but you generate further
turnover over the extended lifespan of an object through service
points, repair points and upgrade points. I think another additional
value to the longer life option is of course that brand loyalty
is more likely to be fostered because in allowing people to be
satisfied with what they own you also generate subliminal affection
for a given brand.
Mr Adams: At Vitsoe we are just coming up to
50 years old and 100 per cent of our turnover is made up of two
products essentially designed in 1960 and 1962. We have fierce
loyalty amongst our customers for the product and that therefore
engenders the future loyalty, the fact that they come back, that
they want to add to the product, that we will repair it, that
they will take it with them when they move house and that is the
entire foundation of our business. The innovation in our business
is in keeping the product absolutely up-to-date, in ensuring that
the service we offer is arguably more important than the product
we offer to ensure that that future loyalty remains.
Q397 Lord Howie of Troon: What is
this product?
Mr Adams: What we are best known for is a shelving
system and display storage that you use in your home or office,
et cetera, and then there is a complete programme of chairs that
works with that.
Q398 Lord Crickhowell: Do you not
have to distinguish between two different sorts of product? I
still like the idea that I was using my mother-in-law's fridge
40 years after it was bought. We had the IT sector in here last
week pointing out that the newer products are using far less energy,
that they are being increasingly designed so that they can be
brought in and recycled and that there are products where the
whole pace of technology and development is such that it may be
to quite an advantage in that they are very cheap, recyclable
and becoming cheaper in energy use terms. It may be that you do
not want your printer or whatever it is to cost a lot and last
a very long time. Do you have to make a distinction is the question
I am asking?
Mr Adams: You certainly do, of course.
Miss McCain: Having a fridge that lasts ten
to 20 years might not be the best sustainable option. Maybe having
a more modern version of a fridge that lasts ten years and then
replacing it for a much more energy efficient one might be a more
sustainable option even though you are possibly producing more
waste. It is looking at the whole life cycle and working out whether
waste or energy efficiency is more important and looking at the
whole life of it. Just assuming that products need to last a lifetime
might not be the best solution.
Dr Chapman: I think it comes back to a more
fundamental question about how do you know when you have reached
sustainable design? When does it start and when does it stop?
Without getting into the etymology of the term, I think it is
also possible that we have kind of an unhealthy perception of
what sustainability is. It is often seen as some kind of utopia
or aspiration where you can look at any given product and it is
faultless, it is without any criticism. If you look at degrees
of sustainability you start to realise that the notion of 100
per cent sustainability—apart from something like, perhaps,
an igloo—is quite difficult to achieve. So when you talk
to people like Gillette and Electrolux about sustainability it
is much healthier to go in and say, "How sustainable is what
you currently do with this specific product, for that specific
market, and how can we look at making it more sustainable?"
I think that is probably a healthier way of looking at it. Product
life extension is one part of that discussion. However, there
are several parts which represent the aggregate package and when
you add it together that is sustainable design.
Q399 Lord Howie of Troon: De Montfort
University's paper told us that the design industry needs to be
better regulated. Can you tell us how or if it is regulated at
the moment and what the problems are? How could regulation be
improved?
Miss Dutton: If we look at some of the regulations
that are not impacting on the design industry at the moment, the
WEEE legislation and the packaging regulations and up and coming
regulations which are not necessarily directly designated towards
product designers but more looking at the product systems themselves,
in our research with SMEs we found that the design industry did
feel that they wanted more guidance and support. The Design Council
has been researching whether that needs to come through regulation
or through skills and training and they are doing some work on
how SMEs can pick up on that. There is a difficulty in that legislation
has to focus on specific outcomes and directions in design development
that may not be appropriate for a lot of product design development
situations and does not foster innovation. So there has to be
a balance between regulation in order to support product designers
in making decisions and choosing certain paths and training so
that, as was mentioned in the last question, designers can have
a greater influence on understanding the whole life cycle of a
product and look at alternative solutions.
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