To me, the
role of design in promoting resource-efficiency is obvious – if we design
products to both consume fewer resources and make the materials easier to
recover at the end of the product’s life, then sustainability becomes systemic
and the circular economy is a natural consequence. And yet a totally different
design philosophy is being adopted in the far east, where the electronics
industry is engaged in a race to the bottom.
Many of
our most prestigious technology brands have become massively wealthy by
outsourcing manufacturing to China and Korea where labour is cheap and
policymakers less interested in workers’ rights. Their focus is on building the
products as cheaply as possible so that they can boost their profit margin to
the maximum their brand value can justify. Innovations like design for
recyclability have no place in this business model – anything that adds cost is
ruthlessly excised in the drive to minimise production cost and maximise
revenue. As a result, those countries have developed a high level of expertise
in low-cost manufacturing of electronic goods that is now becoming a serious competitive
threat to the vendors that instigated it.
One blogger
visiting China this summer was shaken to find that even for a one-off purchase,
with no haggling, he could acquire a perfectly reasonable tablet running
Android Ice Cream Sandwich – with wifi, a camera and all the appropriate
trimmings – for just $45. Little wonder, then, that he was moved to conclude
that hardware is dead. It’s impossible to make a profit on hardware alone when
it becomes so commoditised; the only way to make money is to sell something
else and convince consumers to pay for the whole experience of which hardware
is only a constituent part.
The
implications of this for product designers are profound, because every designer
works to a brief and clients have to ensure that their products or services are
commercially viable. Given a situation where one country both controls many of
the raw materials and has perfected the art of manufacturing a product for a
price nobody can beat, it’s just possible that China’s domination of the
electronics industry could become absolute. Meanwhile, technology vendors face
some tough challenges and a catch-22 situation: reducing reliance on rare
earths requires innovation in product design, which is hard to fund when the
country that dominates the supply of those rare earths is driving price erosion
that reduces margins to levels which mitigate against investment in R&D.
Despite
this observation, I remain optimistic about the ability of the design community
to propel us towards a circular economy. It certainly has the creativity and
passion for the challenge. But vendors will have to adopt a long-term view that
properly values the risks associated with strategic materials and resource
scarcity, and be brave enough to make investments in design innovation that may
take many years to pay back.
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