Design for a thingless future

September 12, 2011

In a resource-limited future, we may not own our things, but instead hire the service they perform. It may change the very nature of our possessions.

CRAVING A NEW CAR? Coveting a Prada handbag? Worrying about the environment? No problem. As a consumer, it's now possible and maybe even sustainable to have it all; at least, if you're willing to rent rather than own.

"What we're seeing now is the preference to access over ownership," says futurist Tim Longhurst. It's a pattern that led trendwatching.com to list renting, loaning and sharing our possessions as one of the top trends of 2011.

And it's a change in consumer behaviour that is leading businesses to question what it is their customers really want. "It's about selling the service, not the product," says James Bradfield Moody, CSIRO executive and former judge on The New Inventors. He explores the issue of ownership in his book The Sixth Wave.

"In a world of limited resources, services become very attractive for a number of reasons. Companies are asking: 'Do people want the photocopier?' No; they want the copied page," Moody says.

According to this premise you don't want the car at all; you simply want to get from A to B. You don't even want the Prada handbag; you just want to look hot on Friday night. Now, thanks to both the ultimate middle man, the web, businesses have discovering how to provide you with both, often at a far smaller hit to your hip pocket than outright ownership would.

Consider GoGet, Australia's first car sharing business, which now has over 10,000 members; Interface carpets, who began renting their products in the 1970s when they realised people really wanted floor coverings, not 'ownership of carpet'; and the emergence of rental companies for everything from handbags and designer clothes through to drills and most recently, textbooks.

Of course, renting as a concept isn't new. We've always rented when it suits us. We rent cars for overseas holidays or tuxedos for weddings, while taxis, public transport and hotel rooms are shared without us batting an eye. The authors of Natural Capitalism have posed such questions since the 1970s; while the book Voluntary Simplicity (1981, since updated) has seen some toying with the idea that less is more for decades.

But the web has already changed what we're willing to rent from businesses, or loan to strangers (now called 'peers'). "The fact that you can better track who has what, better track the reputation of others, and establish your identity quickly online are all driving this change," says Longhurst.

While the death of ownership is unlikely to arise overnight, popular culture's embracing of the trend appears to be pushing it forward. When Sarah Jessica Parker's character commented on her assistant's rented Prada handbag in the first Sex and the City movie in 2008, rentals at Bag, Borrow or Steal went through the roof. Fast forward to 2011 to find Lily Allen's new fashion business based around, you guessed it, rentals.

In the move towards an increasingly ownerless future, designers will need to keep up. The current leader in that field may be William McDonough, who co-authored Cradle to Cradle about redesigning products for longevity and better recycling. But as companies start to embrace the business opportunities of being able to rent or share goods and services with global niche audiences, the very nature of products may have to shift too.

Moody believes most products fall into four categories: single use, multiple use, tools, or trinkets. While he says we'll never give up our trinkets (for example, the coaster you kept from your first date), designers are already learning how to shift products into the increasingly sustainable categories of multiple use items or tools. "It's hard to imagine food becoming a multiple use item, but there's a business opportunity in moving single use items like a disposable cup to a multiple use item like a Keep Cup," he says.

As the movement of renting evolves, businesses could simply view their cups as tools, in the same way many organisations already view their leased computers, office equipment or cars. "Imagine what would happen if a hotel no longer purchased glasses [but leased them]. Suddenly that company would be trying to make those glasses as indestructible as possible," Moody says.

Already the signs of that shift are there. For example at the Geneva Motorshow in February, German company Edag unveiled a car specifically designed with car-share schemes in mind.

A new status symbol
According to psychologist Dr Anna-Marie Taylor, ownership is unlikely to vanish entirely because it offers us a security and predictability that feels real. "We like to own because of predictability. What you own you have control over, potentially," she says.

The problem for humans is true security doesn't come from our possessions. "You see this with people who've been through trauma. For people who have lost everything, their security can no longer be vested in what they own; it has to transfer itself to something deeper inside," she says.

Taylor believes the modern push towards ownership simply plays on the weaknesses of humans desperate to fit in with those around them. "We live in a society that actively cultivates the need to own in order to run the economy. That's playing on something that has a psychological foundation, but is generating a need that isn't real," she says.

Moody says that status for the next generation is as much measured in Facebook friends or Twitter followers as in the type of car you drive. Indeed, Edag's market research on its share-car found 80 percent of 18 to 29-year olds said there was no real need for them to have a car of their own in town.

But is it greener?
Even if we do continue embracing access over ownership, ownership as a concept is more likely to shift than disappear. "Things will always be owned, just not necessarily by the end user," says Longhurst.

He questions the implication that owning less outright will automatically lead to a greener planet. In fact, he suggests that through renting, we may actually end up with access to non-sustainable products we'd never own solo. "I played golf recently with someone with access to a speedboat," he says.

"He shares access to the boat through a membership club, but it costs about $200 a day on petrol. He can now [run a petrol guzzling speedboat] for a price that is more affordable than ever," Longhurst adds.

The inference is that with the affordability of renting, we will start to live the environmentally damaging lifestyles of the rich and famous. While there are endless counter arguments here - if the speedboat has been already built, isn't it better that we just build one, and share it? - Longhurst's observation proves how far the access versus ownership model has already progressed beyond the environmental pioneers who first mooted it.

"What I think is most interesting about the latest iteration of this idea is, because it's mediated through technology and the web, it's growing beyond a base of people coming at it entirely from an environmental ethic," he says.

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