Jacqueline Cramer: Durability and Products

Well ladies and gentlemen, speed also matters with respect to the shift in the ones who present here something, so I was asked to come not too quickly otherwise you could not get adjusted to another person!

Anyhow, my task is to tell you something about the work I try to do in practice to slow down the speed of products. And indeed, when I was asked to talk about this issue, I was thinking: yes indeed, speed matters a lot. Because in general, if you look at the trends in consumption and in production, we see that we indeed need to take care of the speed, both of our processes and about our consumption patterns.

I see indeed that the way we try to change our society with more and more speed is not the way we should proceed. But what drives me is the question: how can you really change the way we are doing things, the way we produce goods and the way consumers consume the goods at even faster speeds than ever before? And what we see as consumers, we consume things in a faster speed and we throw it away in a faster speed. We know all what is going on and the trends are not the way we should proceed if we think about this from an ecological prospective.

What we see and what I try to express is that we actually get into a downward spiral. And what we should try to do is find ways to try to re-orient that spiral and try to come up with a spiral which goes upwards. So we have to go to an upwards spiral and what does it mean? It means that we actually have to try to increase the equal efficiency of the product by a factor of 10, which means that in the coming 50 years we have to try to reduce the burden on the environment to one tenth of the present burden.

And that means a lot, it means that we have to reorient the technological trajectories we are actually trying to push forward now. And I am very well aware that it is not easy, not for the producers, and not, I stress, for the consumers either. It means that the shift in mindset of both the producers and consumers have to be reoriented towards an other way of thinking.

With respect to industry we have to think more in terms that we don't sell the products but we sell the function of the products. As Manzini will explain more in detail tomorrow, we have to sell the final result of the product. And with respect to the consumers, we have to try to establish a more emotional relationship with the products we consume. We have to try to buy quality instead of large quantity of goods. We have in that way tried to get away from the throw-away society and to build up a more sensitive society in that respect.

What is the kind of solution we can aim for? It has already been said by the previous speaker, one of the solutions people always think of is the idea to develop more durable goods. Well, the idea of durability and speed indeed is quite obvious but I like to explain that durability as such is not only the answer to the problems. Most of the time when people think of durability they think about, well, products that last longer. Then we have just less products and that is it. Well, when I talk about durability I like to talk about it in a much more precise way. Let me explain.

In the first place it can mean that we can optimise the users period of products, that can indeed be done by extending the lifetime of the product through more robust designs, we can also think of product recycling, use the product once more. We can also think of possibilities to repair and to increase the maintenance possibilities of products and also think of modern designs in such a way that you can upgrade the product if necessary. We can also think of possibilities to design in such a way that the products are more timeless. It means that it is less susceptible to fashion. You can also think of designs that can be modified according to fashion or changes in taste. And finally you can also think of ways to integrate various functions we need to fulfil with our products, but then through system integration.

This all has to do with the possibilities to optimise the usage period. You can also think of possibilities to increase the intensity of the use of products. And one of the possible examples is sharing of products such as for instance car sharing. You can also think of possibilities not to sell the product but to lease products and there are also various examples already in practice where you see that happening.

If we think about all these possibilities I have to stress that not all these possibilities are environmentally friendly in all situations. Let me give two examples: in the first place, being also senior consultant at Philips sound and vision, I can tell you the following story about TV's. The standard 26-inch TV is a TV which has been developed in the early 70's and the energy consumption at that time of the product was 360 Watts. Now it has been reduced in the late 80's to 90 Watts. Why do I explain this? Because it means that through innovation we were able to reduce the environmental load tremendously. If we had promoted the idea of durability in the 70's it would mean actually a higher burden on the environment than if we had promoted the idea of durability now. Because now with the standard TV we cannot innovate that much any more to reduce the amount of energy consumption to a large extent. So now it becomes interesting to think about durability possibilities.

Another example is the washing machine. There are some people who say: let us go to collective washing places. Of course we all think about these ugly places where we used to go to when we were students. That is not what these people tend to promote, they tend to promote something where you can nicely go to the restaurant and at the same time wash your clothes and so on. That is beautiful of course because then collective washing can perhaps be more environmentally friendly, because it is more efficient in these larger machines and probably you therefore use less energy. But social organisation is not oriented yet to that type of application of the collective washing approach. What we will do if we promote it now is that individual households go by car to a collective washing place, that they put all the things after washing in a dryer, don't dry any more in the open air or on their central heating, so also that consumes more energy and the individual consumer will also have their own washing machine for small washes. So in the end, we really have to think about the whole restructuring of what we are doing and not only about the restructuring the product in order to be really more eco-efficient than we are now.

I really want to stress that very much because when I now go to this slide and you are perhaps puzzled why I asked to produce this slide, that is because working at Philips Sound and Vision, what we try to do is to develop ideas about durability but in such a way that indeed it is in the end more eco-efficient. We develop these plans and brainstorm at various levels within the organisation and also at the level of the various BG's. For instance the BG TV, audio, video and so on. We discuss how we can really put this into practise in such a way that eco-efficiency will increase.

Philips Vision of the Future: www.philips.com/design/vof/toc1/home.htm