If we want to reduce our ecological footprints, we have to use less energy and fewer materials. As engineering and design improve, we're seeing how our products, homes and infrastructure could be vastly more sustainable, but in order to truly engage in one-planet living we have to do better than just make our current ways of life greener: we have to redesign the way we're living, increasing our quality of life while reducing its impact.
One of the fundamental insights that's helping us re-imagine our lives in a brighter, greener cast is that most of the time, we don't want stuff, we want specific needs fulfilled or experiences provided; that, as Amory Lovins puts it, we don't want refrigerators, we want cold beer -- if there were a better, cheaper, cleaner way of providing cold brews, most of us wouldn't shed a tear to see our fridges go. Recognizing that this is true for nearly every product in our lives is revelation number one.
The second revelation in recasting our relationship to stuff is that owning a thing can actually be worse than borrowing it. Dawn likes to remind us that there's enormous waste in the ownership of things: that, for example, the average power drill gets used for ten to twenty minutes in its entire life. Because we've been convinced that not having our own power drill at hand when we need it might lead to disaster or at least embarassment, we have made and purchased millions of power drills which will go essentially unused. This is the epitome of unsustainable waste, involving as it does mountains of mined ore, refineries full of oil, and rivers of waste used to create nothing of value. What's more, those drills sit in our homes, cluttering our spaces, gathering dust and generally making few of us much happier.
In the case of drills, there is a simple solution: the tool library. They already exist in many places, and they're easy to start elsewhere. Why own a drill when you can own a library card and, with a small bit of planning (and we know that walkshed technologies are making planning like this easier every day), have the use not only of a drill but of a whole workshop full of great tools?
What's true of power drills is true of nearly everything.
Sharing clubs already exist for everything from cars to art. Working models for systems which substitute services for products (product service systems) abound, and more companies and community groups are jumping into the field every month. Better still, technical innovations which could support using-not-owning are proliferating (you'll find dozens on Worldchanging alone), dropping what was once a major barrier, the time spent finding, getting and using the service-things we want. We're a long way from frictionless service systems, but improvement and innovation are constant.
We're starting, in fact, to see the outlines of a way of living which is not only much more prosperous and attractive than the way many of us live today, but would allow us to have a fraction of the ecological footprint: bright green urban living, with technology and good design promoting a high quality of life and allowing the sharing of goods and services which were formerly thought of as luxuries. It may just be that product service systems are one of the lynchpins of a new way of living that delivers truly sustainable prosperity.
The big roadblock, though, is that we like owning stuff. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of advertising taught to associate owning stuff with being successful, secure, sexy and safe. If we are serious about redesigning the ways we live, we need to imagine and share visions of living without owning that are at least as compelling. We need new visions, yes, but we may need new branding even more.
The British design firm Live|Work may have part of the answer. They've grown somewhat famous in bright green circles for their recent work, especially their campaign for Streetcar ("The self-service pay-as-you-go car") with the slogan "You are what you use... not what you own."
Now they've had the critical insight that while products tell the world a great deal about who we are when we own them (or at very least, in a cynical light, what marketing representation of ourselves we care to portray), services to which we have access are often culturally invisible
To that end
We can think of products as serving two basic needs; to perform the function they are engineered to do, and to confirm and communicate the owner's set of values. The second function is crucial. Products help us identify ourselves through a complex product and brand language. If we want to make people desire services more than products, then services will also have to communicate these values.
If we want to make people desire services more then products, we have to create services that help people tell each other who they are. Our major challenge is to enable people to express who they are through the use of services instead of through ownership of things. We must create "service envy".
I believe that's right. I think figuring out how to display, even flaunt, the networks and systems of which we are a part is a critical design challenge in this scenario of the bright green future. I don't know how -- reputation systems might play a part; other forms of social signalling might be involved -- but I have a gut feeling that figuring out how to display meaning, status, and group affliation when discussing intangibles is absolutely critical. We are, after all, hairless apes, and as rational as we'd like to think we are, our emotional needs (most of evolutionary origin) still color every thought we have.
We need to make the bright green city, in which we use instead of own, a place which makes us feel better, sexier, safer, more loved. If it doesn't, it'll never work, no matter how good the product design or how strong the wireless signal.
