Designing for Collaborative Consumption
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| Part Number | 32 | |
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| License | CC Attribution - ShareAlike 3.0 Germany: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor and the work or content is shared also in adapted form only under the conditions of this | |
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:19
Hello. I really like Thomas' idea, we should all Twitter.
00:24
Really great stuff happening right now in future Stas Palas. Fill these chairs. Well, thank you. I know you get to see my face a lot today, so I apologize. But I want to take this next 30 minutes to talk about an idea that I think is quite exciting and quite relevant for this audience.
00:41
I'm going to be talking about collaborative consumption. And the way I'm going to do it is a bit of a remix. I'm going to take arguments from a lot of different people and throw it together. You know, pulling people from like Nobel Prize winners and Lawrence Lessig and Sean Bonner and a lot of other cool thinkers. And then conclude by driving the ideas forward with some design challenges.
01:06
Alright, so first a little bit of context. We're living in a hyper-consumption world. You know, I'm not the first person that's going to be up here to tell you that pretty much we're consuming ourselves to death.
01:20
You basically all know the horrible predictions. But, you know, we keep wanting and buying and it's getting worse. And the thing is often consumers are put in as part of the blame. And it's true, we are the people that are purchasing things and driving this hyper-consumption world.
01:40
But I also think designers and manufacturers are playing an important role in the equation as well. I mean, unfortunately, the predominant business model right now is design for the dump. That means making products that on purpose are obsolete
02:00
the moment you take them out of the box. You know, it's people that are actually thinking it's, I mean, it is a lucrative business model, which is why people do it, but it's kind of sick to think you're making something that you have to throw away pretty much the moment you start using it. There's a few common perpetrators of this designing for the dump paradigm
02:25
and pretty much they're selling you, you know, objects that are going to get scratched and you have to throw them away and get the new model. And in our fragile world that's unsustainable. So we're overfilling the landfills and it's not a pretty sight.
02:42
But, you know, so maybe you're somebody that says, you know, I'd rather store the stuff, keep it for a rainy day, maybe I'll use it, you know, under different conditions. Well, that's also a solution that people have. We're seeing an explosion in the industry of self-storage.
03:00
In the U.S. alone, it's a very hyper-consumption nation, there's over two billion square feet of self-storage. That means a land area three times the size of Manhattan is dedicated to storing people's shit. And, you know, in Germany, I think, in general, Germans are more thrifty and more consumption-conscious
03:23
and they don't have quite the same illness that people in the U.S. do. But still, self-storage is on the rise. Within the last ten years, Germany went from having zero storage facilities to 70. And in Europe, we're seeing over 1,500 storage facilities when they only used to be a handful.
03:40
So, this is a trend, it's on the rise, and people are willing to pay premium rent on storing stuff. But lastly, you know, no matter where you're keeping your things, as Bruce Sterling would say, it takes a hell of a lot of energy just to maintain all of this stuff.
04:01
You have to heat it and cool it and care for it, and the time that you spend taking care of your stuff is time that you don't spend with your family, with your friends, with yourself, with your society. So, when we're investing all of this energy in, you know, taking care of all these objects that we own,
04:21
we really have to ask ourselves, who is being owned by whom? All right, so, enough of the doomsday stuff, I wanted to get some audience interaction with all ten of you. How many of you own a power drill, out of curiosity?
04:44
All right, the people in the front, that's an interesting trend. The active ones here. How many of you that own the power drill have used it in the last, let's say, last month? Okay, just a handful from there. How many within the last six months? I'll give you a little bit of a chance.
05:01
Okay, so some active drillers. But there's still quite a lot of people that own a drill that haven't even used it in the last month or last six months. That means there's this power drill just sitting there on the shelf with all these spare cycles. You know, that's a lot of potential and a lot of use that we could be getting out of those power drills that are otherwise just collecting dust.
05:23
So, what if there were a way that we could capture those spare cycles? You know, what if we could actually get more efficient about things like power drills? You know, we could have, like, apps that tell us that all the available power drills are in our neighborhood and send a notification to that guy who kept raising his hand that he's got a power drill and saying, you know,
05:41
it's available, you can borrow it. I mean, this would really be, you know, a boost to how we use objects more efficiently. And this is actually where I see hope in our situation. You know, I see one clear advantage that we have that no other generation before us has and that's the power of our networks.
06:03
With networks, we can share better and we can provide infrastructure better and we can leverage these networks to build, buy, and collaborate locally and efficiently. We can shop smarter, share better, and use our networks both online and off to reduce waste and improve the economy, environment, and even have a good time doing it.
06:23
So today, I want to talk about new forms of collaboration and consumption and I want to talk about the opportunities and goals that push us to be better to our planet and to ourselves. And have some water.
06:41
Okay, so you might all be familiar with this symbol. We learned in school that it stands for reduce, reuse, recycle. And I think it's a pretty powerful concept. I mean, first, let's just reduce things. Let's buy less shit. Second, let's reuse the stuff that we do buy. Let's reuse it more.
07:01
And lastly, when we reuse that stuff to its last possible point, we recycle it. Well, I want to recycle this diagram for today and riff on it a little bit. So let's first talk about reduction. That means buying less stuff, which is easy to say, but also, increasingly, it's easier to do.
07:25
There's a lot of people like this dude right here who are saying, you know, I don't need closets full of things and I don't need all this self-storage units. You know, I can actually consolidate my life into a hundred items or less. So there's people galvanizing around terms like cult of less, tech nomads,
07:45
who are really aspiring to this principle of having less stuff but having it better. So he says, Kelly Sutton, the founder of the cult of less movement, I will eliminate a large part of stress in my life and I will truly cherish the few things that I own.
08:05
So what are you waiting for? Let's go sell some stuff. Get rid of things, you know, just throw it away, those fancy ball gowns and tuxedos and nice shoes that you keep in bubble wrap and, you know, nice Christmas presents from well-intending relatives that you never took out of the box.
08:20
We should sell that stuff because sustainable practices mean that they last, that they navigate and last through time and space, where other stuff just cracks and falls apart. I think in this day and age, in the 21st century, we have to rethink our relationship to material possessions.
08:41
The things that occupy our time, the things that are closest to you are the things that take up most of your time. So these are the things that you have to be the most wise about when you purchase. So choose wisely. You can sell the junk, take the money and get a real bed. So, as Bruce Sterling says, he's a great guy, he's really good for sound bites,
09:04
get radically improved everyday things. Just enough is more. So yeah, we've got things we're using everyday, laptops, phones, beds, these things we should care about, these should be quality over quantity. And the other stuff, like these power drills, like let's innovate around reuse.
09:27
So, if it's not as efficient to own that power drill, it's just efficient, or it's more interesting, let's say, to use the power drill. We're talking about having access to the power drill. And in a lot of ways, you'll find more wealth in use than in ownership.
09:45
And access is actually better than ownership in many examples. So, the interesting news for our day and age is that it's getting easier and easier to access things. You know, we have places like the lovely Beta House, a co-working space here in Berlin.
10:04
And you know, you can rent a desk, you can hang out with fellow digital nomads, and you don't have to buy a printer. Like, how cool is that, that you don't have to repair and refill and maintain and eventually dispose of a printer? Because this place provides shared infrastructure for you.
10:20
And you can go there and you can benefit and have access to these things. And you know, it's just cool places like the co-working spaces, but there's also all sorts of P2P services that are coming up that are allowing you to share cars, like Zipcar, or to share accommodation like Airbnb and couchsurfing,
10:40
or to share stuff like neighbour goods. There's a whole slew of these sites, and they're making it more flexible and more agile and more social to share. And what's kind of cool too is, you know, sometimes you look at these sites and you're like, that's cool, but isn't that for like low-budget 20-somethings and students? But actually there's a lot of interesting business models on the luxury end as well.
11:04
So there's collaborative consumptions in places like the Berkeley Hotel. It's this pretty exclusive hotel in London. And they've created this thing called the Fashion Trunk. And they fill it with high-end luxury goods, jewelry, bags, etc. And the guests can come in
11:21
and they can wear the stuff and use it during their stay. And at the end of the stay, they either can purchase it or they just leave it back in the trunk. So I think this is an invitation for us to really rethink, to say collaborative consumption can work. It can work for the Fashion Trunk. It can work for cars.
11:41
It can probably work for lots of other things we haven't even thought of yet. So that's my invitation for us. Oops. Just kidding. I skipped one. Never mind. Da, da, da, da, da, da. To distill this idea of what is it that makes an effective collaborative consumption model,
12:04
we have to first figure out what are the characteristics of a shared object. So first you need idling capacity. You need those drills that are sitting on shelves that have spare cycles. We need a settee at home for power drills. We need to be able to take advantage of this surplus
12:20
that makes collaborative consumption possible. And now we need critical mass. You know, couch surfing isn't going to work if you only have two couches. So supply feeds more demand and we need these systems to be robust and to have a critical mass so that they're interesting and attractive for users. And then trust.
12:41
Trust is another thing. It's easier said than done, but it can grow organically and there are a lot of mechanisms to build in to sharing sites and platforms, mechanisms that foster trust. And some of those come through things like commons governance. You know, having conflict resolution that's easy and cheap and having the resource owners partake in the decision making processes.
13:03
We can learn a lot from how the commons are governed in other spaces to figure out how to do collaborative consumption better. So now I want to invite you to rethink and to think about how you, people like you,
13:20
people in this room, you know, not only are consumers, but also designers and entrepreneurs and the people that understand the world's most powerful communication medium in history. I mean, who are the people in this room that can help us rethink? So that's why I want to have an invitation today to rethink. To rethink consumption, to rethink use, to rethink design and manufacturing.
13:50
And to do this, I wanted to end the talk with some design challenges. So we can talk in abstract, but it's also really cool to leave here with some ideas of, okay, what can we do next? What's possible? So I like this idea. There's a lot of phones that accept multiple SIM cards.
14:07
So you can have one shared object that actually accepts data from multiple users. So you can, you know, slip in your SIM card and you've got, like, your address book and your contacts, whatever, your personal settings.
14:21
And that object then becomes, you know, personalized for each person that's using it. Can we do that for other objects? You know, can we do that for cars or refrigerators or printers or vending machines? Can we personalize shared objects better? Or imagine a library that doesn't just offer books.
14:43
Like, let's explode the idea of a library and think of filling it with things like tools or electronics or, you know, I don't know, jewelry and other sorts of cooking appliances, things that we could actually think of as a common pooled resource and, you know, have it function the same way libraries have for centuries
15:02
but offer objects that all of us could benefit from. So let's diversify libraries. Also, here's an idea. In free culture, there's this concept of open layers. It's saying, you know, instead of giving someone a compressed video file, give them the raw footage, the audio track, the transcript, the images,
15:24
everything separated out in different layers because then it's really easy to remix and rebuild from those different layers. Like, let's take this idea and, you know, do it with objects. Like, let's create objects that are easily remixable and with open layers.
15:45
Or here's another fun idea. What if we built in modularity in our objects? So instead of when your iPhone gets scratched, you don't have to throw away the whole thing, it's more like Lego-fied and you can take the pieces apart and you can replace things a lot easier and you can also customize things easier.
16:02
We can build in modularity into products so that we don't have to throw things out the moment one thing doesn't break. And here's another suggestion. There's this theater in Dallas that's reconfigurable at the flip of a switch. It's got all these different combinations of seating and stage
16:23
where the actors can come in and all these things and this has transformed that space into being a really rich cultural hub. It used to be just a boring theater. So can we take this idea and transform all sorts of spaces so that we don't have to always have all this idling real estate, which Rylin knows a bit well,
16:41
but we can also think as architects about how we can build in customization and reconfiguration so that people can transform spaces and get the most out of them. And lastly, I think a very powerful idea, you think about having a baseball mitt
17:01
and when you first buy it, it's really stiff and it's hard to use, but over time, it starts to mold and through use, the baseball mitt becomes better. What if we did this with more objects, that the more you use them, the more value you got? Things didn't depreciate with use, they got better.
17:21
I mean, we can do this, think about it in a physical way, but we can also think about it in a data way, things that can collect data, usage data points, user metadata, this sort of thing, things that get smarter, better, more useful, the more often we use them. And then we can really turn the consumption paradigm on its head.
17:41
So there's a lot of potential, there's a lot of business opportunities, there's a lot of creative opportunities for adventuresome smart people like you. So I encourage you to reduce, reuse and rethink and let's take a cue from the makers. Let's give objects a new life by thinking creatively and collaboratively about them.
18:00
The maker ethic is actually really empowering one. It's saying that we have the tools and the knowledge to make a difference. So actually, together, we can really change the world. Thank you. Thank you, Michelle. Do we have any questions?
18:22
Michelle, I was wondering when I heard your speech, how about Germany? Because, I mean, in America, for example, the idea of car sharing, so sharing your own car and putting it into a pool, it seems to be way more common than in Germany.
18:42
Are Germans, I mean, you're the person who can talk about this, are Germans more focused on owning something? Well, I mean, in Germany, you have Mitzvah Gelligenheit. So I actually, I mean, this idea of a ride board or a ride share is actually very prominent within the culture already and actually more so than in the US.
19:02
I'm not a stranger. So I think there is already practices that are built in within Germany. So I think also these things are effective when they build on practices that people are already familiar with. And I think car sharing has just as much potential here as it would in a place like New York or something.
19:20
Okay, I don't see anyone asking a question. There's one. Oh, there's one. Okay, sorry. Yeah, I have a question. I thought the idea of sharing power tools is lacking one thought
19:44
because, well, for many men, I know that it has a very emotional side and they might not like to share it. Point taken.
20:01
Yeah, I mean, I think these systems are powerful when they're opt-in, of course. So nobody's forcing you to share a power drill. But I also think, you know, we can also build in mechanisms that allow you to have, you know, insurances or other sorts of, like, reputation management or other things where you feel like, okay, there's enough trust built up in the system
20:21
so that I'm okay giving it to somebody else. A hammer is better? Next time. Republica 12. Okay, there's a question. This is all right. I really like the idea of sharing stuff, which you just told us.
20:47
And on the other hand, there's this problem that many products are just, you can't repair them anymore because they're just impossible to take apart. What do you think of how could we consumers start to make more use
21:06
of old stuff and try to encourage ourselves to repair things? Yeah, that's a fantastic question. I think, so yeah, on both sides, from the designers, they need to build more modularity so that we can do these things.
21:21
And also as consumers, I think this idea of becoming makers and of if you can't open it, you don't own it, and having curiosity about objects. So, you know, I also have an Apple product, and I don't know what's going on inside of it, but maybe I should get over that restraint and open it up and start to understand the pieces
21:40
because I think once we understand how the things fit together, we also create drive and demand in the market for things like components and smaller pieces. So, I think the first step is curiosity and knowledge, and then the second step is more active. Then we can start building, and the market will probably reflect the activities of consumers doing that.
22:01
There's a question over there. Nice question. Given that libraries already exist, why do people then still buy books? So, I really like the idea, but I think there must be millions of impedance, otherwise it would have been in place in something, like for some products already. For which part already? Sorry. For instance, for books, I mean,
22:21
there have been libraries around for a couple of hundred years and people still buy books. So, what stops people from just going to the library? I think one doesn't cancel the other, right? There are complementary systems, or there are systems that function in different ecosystems for different reasons. So, there is actually tool libraries. There are some in various cities,
22:41
and they use the metaphor of a library, and people still buy tools. They sometimes buy tools to put in the tool library, or they have tools because they have emotional attachment to their power drills that they don't put in the library. So, I think that there's still a lot of opportunity to explore this idea of a library without saying the market will completely collapse
23:02
and we'll buy things the same way. Any more questions? I don't see any raised hands. So, thank you, Michelle. We're going to take a five-minute break and then we're going to see one of the speakers I'm looking forward the most, Solana Larsen, the managing editor of Global Voices.
23:21
See you in five minutes.