ABSTRACT

In one of his writings the economist John Maynard Keynes famously comments on the tendency of practical businessmen to ignore economics. This is all very well, he notes, but these same businessmen are usually blithely unaware that their actions are nonetheless guided by (often defunct) economic ideas. Unawareness does not make the latter without effect. On the contrary, precisely as a result of being assimilated without thought these ideas are often far too powerful. Handbooks are practical things. But Keynes’ lesson is that concepts may be no less practical than recipes for action. Product design, a notoriously practical discipline, in the main assimilates rather than reflects on its guiding concepts. These enter into practice almost below the level of thought, as scarcely questioned axioms. This remains true even though, especially at the pedagogical level, there has been a revolution, both in those doing product design (above all the entry of women into a field that as late as 40 years ago was almost entirely male) and – if far less focused – on the sense of what ‘product’ might be. Nonetheless, and this comes out particularly in the subject of this book, the relation between ‘product design’ and ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainment’ remains un-thought, a matter of assumption not reflection, as this chapter argues. Above all there is lack of reflection on the manner in which the two active concepts or categories not only interact with one another but perhaps inhibit each other. The assumption that through virtuous intention it must be possible to render product design sustainable cuts out careful reflection on the tensions actually present in this relation; tensions that in fact inhibit and delimit practice. In this context there might therefore be practicalvalue in raising what appears to be at first sight merely theoretical questions. It may be that through such questions it becomes possible to grasp the outlines of a practice that is able to overcome the tensions that in practice not only delimit and weaken the contribution of (even ‘sustainable’) product design to sustainment but more widely restrict and weaken the practice of designing things.