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Featured
Speaker |
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Money Is Green
Hartmut Esslinger, Founder, frog design
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| Hartmut Esslinger |
Let’s be honest: Design—like marketing—is about driving mass consumption and ultimately contributes to pollution and global warming. We designers are players in an economic model which depends on multiplying products into thousands and millions. This is certainly also a result of our own promotion as professionally respected contributors to economic success—but by itself this is not an achievement to be proud of. We need to change the economic business model towards “smarter with less” and we need to advance our profession towards the strategic early stage of the process, where ecological strategy needs to be defined to be effective. We must innovate the way companies interact and collaborate with their customers and visa versa.
My personal goal is to drive for an innovative business model with a more proactive and humanistic approach to industrial planning, production, usage and recycling. So far, European legislation is setting good standards for recycling in industrial products, but this is just the very last stage of the product lifecycle. Changing the front-end of the industrial process and changing the process model from designing for continuation to humanistic innovation also requires new business models in which the customers—as a group of power—join executives, employees and owners/shareholders as actively involved stakeholders by becoming “market-shareholders.” The power is shifting—and we designers have the obligation to create and operate the new controls.
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