Article

Designing Longer Lasting Products

Dr Conny Bakker interviews Marcel den Hollander, product designer and PhD researcher at TU Delft. Marcel talks about a well-known design dilemma: the desire to create timeless products versus the need to work in a commercial and dynamically changing business environment with a continuous demand for ‘new’.

 

 MAIN TAKEAWAYS:

  • Product designers need to balance many different requirements when developing a new product. 
  • Although designers sometimes wish they could design a “classic”, they need to take into account that products often operate in a changing context and therefore have to change over time. 
  • In a linear economy where “sell more, sell faster” is the dominant principle, creating longer lasting products usually doesn’t make sense.

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