Products, Experiences Design… What’s Next, Vote Design?

We no longer consume products; we consume today experiences and most of all we are looking forward to share values.

“La question elle est vite répondue ?”

Ownership is no longer the status symbol it once was , hence the rise of the sharing economy experiences such as AirBnB, Uber, Rent the Runway, and similar services.

Today, we spend our hard-earned cash on experiences that make us happy rather than buying objects.

Sure, we might buy the latest iPhone, but that is just as much of a gateway or platform to experiences than it is a possession.

What’s more, we want our purchases to align with our values.

Plenty of people refuse to buy Nestle products, for example, because of the company’s questionable ethics in terms of clean drinking water and other dubious behaviors. The popularity of applications such as Vinted, a platform for buying and selling used clothing and other products, is as much about overcoming the destructive nature of fast fashion as it is about getting a good deal.

We want our purchases to mean something, to have a positive impact on the economy and the environment.

Brands and designers should not be concerned only about form and function. Instead, they need to think about the experience of those products in relation to a customer’s experience and values. In this sense, the resources needed to construct a product aren’t just metal or plastic.

In fact, there’s now only one resource that’s truly important: Data.

Sensors will eventually replace buttons and keyboards in order to provide top computing and sensing capabilities.

And thanks to increased connectivity and the proliferation of sensors and Internet of Things, hardware can now help us understand how people interact with it and how it interacts with the environment.

This means that in the near future, hardware will need to be more adoptable to specific local usages and more responsive to the environment—both in terms of sustainability but also in terms of the physical environment a user is in at any given moment; i.e. office, home, a public park, etc. This will create huge opportunities in the coming years to advance human-computer interaction in intelligent ways according qualified needs and available resources.

The most successful products will be technologies that can evolve in real time in a systemic and natural-feeling method.

What’s more, successful products will be modifiable and customizable by its users, as in the entire right to repair movement. Thanks to the Internet, knowledge in the form of online courses and tutorials allows us to rely on ourselves or online communities to make the changes in products we desire, which ultimately leads to longer product life and a deeper relationship to that product.

Instead of delivering fixed, limited, and compromised products, brands must shift to being more of a platform that facilitates adaptative and resilient solutions to a wide variety of applications. But it doesn’t stop with the current model; knowledge generated from millions of users benefits future development, pushing new partnerships and growing a common culture.

From a design point of view, we are moving beyond the need to design interaction, but rather developing relationships that engender trust and common culture for a society we believe in.

Indeed, as relationships with products that deliver the type of experiences users desire, a more responsive and global system of systems will certainly emerge that will more clearly help us understand each other and the world around us.