DESIGNING LONGER LASTING PRODUCTS (1/3)

Dr Conny Bakker interviews Marcel den Hollander, product designer and PhD researcher at TU Delft. Marcel talks about a well-known design dilemma: the desire to create timeless products versus the need to work in a commercial and dynamically changing business environment with a continuous demand for ‘new’.

MAIN TAKEAWAYS:

• Product designers need to balance many different requirements when developing a new product.
• Although designers sometimes wish they could design a “classic”, they need to take into account that products often operate in a changing context and therefore have to change over time.
• In a linear economy where “sell more, sell faster” is the dominant principle, creating longer lasting products usually doesn’t make sense.