Tragedy of the Commons

Modern product development is a complex endeavor requiring the careful management of competing demands and constraints. A common framework for evaluating a product’s success identifies three key factors:

Business: How viable is the product from an investment and profit point of view? How effective will it be from a competitive and brand point of view?

Technology: How feasible is the product to develop and manufacture? Does the company have the required technology in-house or do partnerships need to be considered?

People: How desirable is the product to potential customers? Is it satisfying user desires or addressing unmet needs?

Seasoned businesspeople know that the greatest likelihood of success comes from products that address all three factors.

by creating products that are held onto longer, we can make better use of the precious resources we have.”

As the glut of available products in recent years has made a pure Business- and Technology-driven approach less profitable, the People factor has gained increasing prominence in the business world. Companies are undertaking intensive research efforts of every kind, eager to develop an ever more nuanced sense of their customers’ needs and wants. At frog, we employ many types of ethnographic research and contextual inquiry, spending time in users’ homes and offices to better understand how our products function in the lives of consumers.

In the past, I have argued that such research is, in itself, an eco-friendly activity because it reduces the speed with which products – and the raw materials we heat, beat, and treat to create them (as the biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus puts it) – end up in the landfill. Ideally, this type of research is a win-win situation: it helps a company make products that are better suited to the consumers at hand, encouraging purchase and establishing the lasting emotional connections that cause a product to be kept and used longer. The notion of the modern-day family heirloom seems almost quaint – what from today’s industrial culture can you imagine being passed down to re-appear on an episode of Antiques Roadshow two centuries from now? – but by creating products that are held onto longer, we can make better use of the precious resources we have.

Small, individual choices that seem innocuous at the time add up to a problem of global proportions.”

That said, longer-lasting products are not enough. And in fact, the notion of user-centered design can itself be environmentally harmful. Users may be unintentionally selfish when they ask for new product features or attributes. In their understandable personal drive for greater convenience and lower costs, they often ask for things that, when multiplied to an industrial scale, are ecologically damaging. Bottled water, for example, has been a massive growth category in the last few years, appealing to customers because of its fantastic convenience. For busy parents shuttling kids to soccer or Little League, a case of bottled water stashed in the back of the minivan is an easy way to keep the kids hydrated. But do parents realize the cumulative impact of all those bottles? Chris Jordan’s amazing photographs, elsewhere in this issue, graphically illustrate this multiplication of disposable waste. Small, individual choices that seem innocuous at the time add up to a problem of global proportions.