Designing Products to be Shared
15th April 2011
Mary Fallon at Sharable.net:
…the answer to lower costs may be to source cars that are actually designed for sharing rather than for the private ownership model where carmakers’ profits depend on selling as many expensive and disposable cars as possible.
Zipcar’s predicament suggests that designing products for sharing may be key to making certain sharing systems viable. When developing products to be shared, one must consider different design principles than the ownership model of consumption such as low cost, standardization, reliability, modular components, durability, and absence of non-essentials.
The article concludes with a survey of ten products designed to be shared.
April 15th, 2011 at 2:30 pm
The article makes a very important point, it’s not just about the products in isolation, but about holistically considering the whole system of production and consumption of the product-service system. So, in this sense, this is a next step in the important development of open manufacturing systems, after the emergence of open hardware itself.
Michel