Emotionally Sustainable Design

Long description

Emotionally sustainable design aims at developing an emotional attachment to our possessions to reduce waste and promote a more sustainable lifestyle. The problem with our current sustainable solutions is that they mostly focus on recycling. As a result, consumers use recycling as an excuse to waste more. As designers, opting for eco-friendly and recyclable materials is not enough to break the never-ending cycle of purchasing and discarding possessions that are still perfectly functional.

The core of this problem lies in consumer behavior and bad habits. We constantly want to buy “new and shiny” things and find joy in the novelty they provide. We discover these objects, understand how they work, use them a few times until we no longer find them exciting. This leads to boredom and the eventual discarding of these once prized possessions.

​This project is an experiment that tests the effects of empathy on the consumer. The product possesses all the fundamental characteristics that unconsciously incite the end-user to sustain an emotional attachment towards it: it evolves over time with user interaction enabling a user-object bond. The focus of this experiment is on the package rather than the product to discourage the user to discard it after purchasing, which consequently prolongs its life cycle.

This experiment is conducted with a cooking knife and its packaging, and could be a measuring ground for future explorations of emotionally sustainable solutions in fields such as fashion, furniture, or technology.

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