Locus Research Original product development

Professor Michael Braungart the co-author of 'Cradle to Cradle - remaking the way we make things' visited New Zealand over the last week to keynote at the Better by Design CEO summit. We were fortunate enough, along with the support of MFE, SBN, and DINZ to create an opportunity for him to talk the day after this to a group of New Zealand's leading designers and design teams.

Professor Michael Braungart the co-author of "Cradle to Cradle - remaking the way we make things" visited New Zealand over the last week to keynote at the Better by Design CEO summit. We were fortunate enough, along with the support of MFE, SBN, and DINZ to create an opportunity for him to talk the day after this to a group of New Zealand's leading designers and design teams.

Professor Braungart delivered a typically hardline presentation effectively telling the attending designers that 'I am currently doing your job', a message that whilst hard to swallow has some merit when it comes to changing products for the better.

The key message buried amongst some of the technical material is that most metrics that relate to sustainability or the development of improved products and services are 'negative', changing these to positive or constructive provides a better platform for improving environmental effectiveness.

Professor Braungart's diagram below moves the discussion from efficiency to effectiveness. Visualising a product that is 100% effective or successful seems like a better aspiration than getting something to zero. 100% in an exam is total success, so we know and understand positive attributes on that scale intuitively.
The other key concept is the idea of making simple and effective decisions around whether something is a biological or technical nutirient. The idea of a biosphere and technosphere exists in a wide range of scientific work and recognises the difference between some materials which are made by people and consequently need to be 'managed' by people as the biosphere cannot effectively deal with them.

In effect he is asking designers to think about how they manage and purpose the materials they select and use.

Technical materials which cannot be effectively consumed by natural processes safely should become a product of service or a 'product service system'.

These ideas promote the implementation of product stewardship programmes and more careful selection of materials that are safe to use, consume or can be effectively managed.

In a small country like New Zealand, where the lack of scale is a problem, this message can be hard to think about implementing. However with the holistic approach companies can create lasting benefit from this. I met a company last night 'reusit air filters' and simply, this husband and wife team in rotorua are doing it, managing the materials used in air filters for transport and industry at a fraction of the current cost.

It is a hard message when you've been pre-conditioned to view sustainability in a different language, but the promotion of positive and constructive value around improving the environmental condition seems an important step. See

http://www.braungart.com/vision.htm for his personal site and vision and visit http://www.nutec.de/ for the fair that he and his team are currently organising.

It was thought provoking so we are interested in your comment.