Ignite Conversation: Designing Ends
POSTPONED | Ignite Conversation: Designing Ends
Originally planned for 20th October – we apologise for the short-notice postponement of this event. A new date will be announced soon.
We are lost, oscillating between powerful, short term, individualistic desires satisfied by consumerism and an overburdened society that passively picks up the fallout of that consumption. At one end of this consumer lifecycle we celebrate new products, showering them with our attention. At the other end we shamefully talk about plastic in the sea. We fail to connect the two issues in a common narrative. One happens inside the consumer experience. One happens as part of social concern.
The consumer lifecycle, the narrative foundation of this process, is broken beginning from end.
It is this which stops us dealing with consumerism’s biggest problems. We need to create emotionally engaging endings as part of the consumer experience. This is not a small task. As I set out in the previous Ends book, it is a deep, societal framing that has led to this bias in the consumer lifecycle. Established over centuries through aspects of religion, social changes and economic needs.
We need to create endings in our consumer experiences to improve the ills of consumption, to change business culture and to inspire consumer responsibility.
Panelist
Joe Macleod is founder and Head of Endineering at AndEnd – the worlds first customer ending business. A veteran of product development industry with decades of experience across service, digital and product sectors. He now specialises in designing endings for consumer experiences, an emerging and critical new discipline he calls Endineering.
Endineering aims to design specific elements which can be incorporated throughout the consumer lifecycle and frame the ending purposefully. These elements combine to mitigate problems as diverse as carbon impact, pollution, privacy loss in digital or mis-selling in financial services. Endineering aims to guide the consumer through the final stages of their engagement with a product to achieve a better and less damaging ending.
He is author of the Ends book, that established this new design genre in 2018. iFixIt1 called Ends the best book about consumer e-waste. He is a TEDx Speaker. Wired says “An energetic Englishman, Macleod advises companies on how to game out their endgames. Every product faces a cycle of endings, from breakage to customer burnout to falling behind consumption trends. It’s important to plan for each of them. Not all companies do.” And the new book – Endineering, that people are saying “defines and maps out a whole new sub-discipline of study”. He now trains some of the worlds leading businesses in bringing a wonderful end to their product experiences.