Читать книгу Products that Last - Conny Bakker - Страница 22

products that last – 21

Low-tech ways to make coffee: the perculator, the ROK espresso maker and the French press.

superfluous materials that will become useless, or raw materials which will be fed to recycling machinery to regain value.

Finally the brand new coffee machine, together with seemingly relevant printed matter, is packed in a cardboard box which protects it and advertises it on the outside. It is transported with numerous of its fellow products on trucks and ships, briefly stored, put on display in a shop or at a market, and sold to a customer. All these actions provide extra layers of value.

The final value factor is what the customer is prepared to pay on top of the actual cost which, incidentally, includes what the producer and suppliers were prepared to pay. That final factor constitutes the income generated by the new coffeemaker for the people involved in designing, producing and marketing it.

Here we arrive at the traditional horizon of linear product development. Beyond this line of ‘newness’, product lifespan considerations are, in general, virtually absent. From the perspective of the producer and the designer, after it has been sold our poor coffeemaker ends up in the ‘coffeemaker hereafter’: and it hasn’t even brewed a single cup of coffee.