Endineering

Engineering happier endings?

Joe Macleod, Founder & Head of ‘Endineering’ at andEnd and author of Ends and Endineering talks to Danielle Kenneally 

Challenging the concepts of good design, engineering, sustainability and ecological principles

EVERY product and every life must come to an end. We all know this so why don’t we plan good endings for ourselves, our products, our services and our digital lives – endings that have the potential to protect the future of our planet and our children? These are the questions posed by the founder and head of ‘Endineering’ at andEnd and author of two books, Ends and Endineering, Joe Macleod.

For more than twenty years, the product developer has been teaching and mentoring individuals and businesses about the need to plan for the inevitable ending that befalls every product or service. He speaks to the Civil Engineering Surveyor’s Danielle Kenneally about his work, his books, which are based on his knowledge and experience in product design and engineering, and his mission to re-examine the psychology of consumerism and the ethics of waste management and sustainability.

Tell us about the idea behind your two books Ends and Endineering.

I‘ve worked in design for 20-plus years, including physical, product design, interactional design, digital design, and service design. Working alongside a lot of different companies from around the world, designing physical products and services, I noticed that we would have very rich conversations about how we can sell a new product, what this new product was and we would design and craft it how it would be experienced and then we’d all walk away without acknowledging, how the product ends. In more than 20 years in product development I realised I’d never had a discussion about how a product ends.

I started looking into the ‘endings’ of the lifecycles of products. There was no vocabulary to help designers and consumers discuss how products end and how to take account of product endings during the product development process and it was clear that somebody needed to give us that terminology to help us talk about the concept of product endings – and that somebody might as well be me.

Where did your research take you and how did you go about developing your ideas?

Many of the conversations we have in product design, creation and development focus around three periods. The onboarding period, which includes the advertising and marketing of a product or service, the usage period and the offboarding period – the last period of the consumer lifecycle effectively where the consumer becomes abandoned. Consumers often need to query whether something is recyclable, especially with e-waste. For example, many people have a discarded phone in their drawer, which is old, or old Bluetooth speakers that are broken, but you don’t really know what to do to dispose of them. We’ve designed these very rich, incredibly emotional experiences for the onboarding and usage periods, but we don’t do the same for its ending. As a result, we’ve got this massive problem with pollution, missold financial services, and privacy on social networks, from a failure to consider all three periods.

I began to address the issue of offboarding and started a small project around ‘closure experiences’ – exploring the end of the product lifecycle. I’ve built that up over the years through my andEnds company, presentations and talks, training sessions and two books about the subject.

How did you tie this into your books?

The first book, Ends, was very much how and why we don’t design for the end of a product’s life and how to tackle these behaviours and mindsets. In many ways it’s a big sort of social history, looking into societies’ sociological issues and psychological issues. It really frames the problem area within northern Europe, after the plague; the protestant uprising, the industrial revolution and the emergence of capitalism as described by Max Weber in his work The Protestant Work Ethic – a famous book in sociology.

We’ve always been sold products with sales claims of ‘this is a better material, it makes a better product, and your future will be better because of buying this product’, whereas what manufacturers should also be saying is ‘when the product comes to an end, we’re going to be here to claim back all of those materials’.

That echoes what happened in consumerism, with the rise of capitalism and more consumption. That’s how we’ve built the foundations of the consumer and consumerism. It’s part of the problem with where we’re at now with pollution where we don’t really think about it in terms of a complete lifecycle of what we’re going to improve. I think it’s an enormous part of how we can’t grapple with a lot of big problems in human behaviour around things like carbon, plastics and pollution and misselling of financial services.

The second book, Endineering, is about how to design an ending – it’s a practical guide. This, for me, was achieved between 2017 and now, by doing conferences, training sessions, and applying some of the thinking I gathered from those to build techniques, models and training for others. It means I’ve been able to lay down how to solve the reasons why we don’t design good endings for our products and services, and look at how to engineer an ending, hence its title, Endineering.

What is the problem?

What we tend to do is blame material matter. An example of this is plastic in the sea, which we need to solve. The average consumer doesn’t go out to buy plastics, so we’re blaming the material instead of what we’re doing ourselves, in terms of actions and behaviour. The consumer never goes down the road and says, ‘I’m just popping out to buy some plastic’, they’re popping out to buy something that solves an issue in their life, but at the offboarding stage, we start to talk about material matter all the time.

The big problem is that we haven’t moved on in complexity of products. A pen, for example, is infinitely more complex as a product to dismantle than say a plastic bag. It’s got poisonous ink, it’s got springs, and it’s made up of different plastics, but we haven’t even got to that, so think about how slow that increases in terms of complexity and then imagine your phone in about a century or two. Many of the problems around consumerism stem from an inability to resolve the end and build that offboarding experience. We need to begin to design good endings now. Endineering for offboarding at the end of a product’s life is something that all industries should be embracing.

How can this relate to the civil engineering industry as a whole?

I was talking to somebody in the industry who, as an older professional, said he was now seeing buildings and infrastructure being built using materials that had a shorter lifespan of 10-20 years – completely different to 200 years ago. I think there’s a big kick back that as much as we’ve grown in our attitude to the environment and waste disposal, the industry is still producing and selling many cheaper products which are more complicated to dismantle.

There needs to be more thought about a construction project’s longevity, as well as about the consumer offboarding experience, about when that building or infrastructure comes down – I understand the civil engineering industry has a lot of responsibilities around this.

In architecture, there’s a whole movement around identifying and selecting components which are very stable and can be dismantled easily. This has seen a return to materials like steel and wood, instead of high-end plastics or panelling. A tragic example is Grenfell Tower, which used complicated materials. There needs to be more thought about a construction project’s longevity, as well as about the consumer offboarding experience, about when that building or infrastructure comes down; its dismantling and deconstruction.

I understand the civil engineering industry has a lot of responsibilities around this, but I also imagine that some in the industry don’t think about the offboarding, the endings, of construction projects but rather they’re thinking about how do we get this built on time and on budget? Not how is it dismantled when I’m out of this job and long gone from the world. It’s important for climate change and what we do to combat these wider issues that affect future generations. Many will find that the content of the first book will give an interesting take on this, about it being a big societal sociological problem that has been centuries in the making.

What consumables have the best and worst endings?

The worst ones, I think are e-waste. It’s a massive, massive problem. We haven’t even started grappling with it yet, however, there are companies like Fairphone, for example, which are real pioneers in that sector, but companies like these are absolutely tiny in numbers.

Other massive companies though are not doing good work. When you get a new phone, you have a very clear coherent onboarding experience, from opening it, transferring all your data, so your phone is up and running – it’s seamless. But then the offboarding experience is that it is abandoned.

The consumer is left to themselves to resolve it and that’s when the bad decisions start. Map that out for almost all products, services, and digital product experiences, that are navigated alone and we have real big problems. For e-waste as a whole, research by Giffgaff recognised that for every household in London, there’s 13 bits of e-waste. Birmingham was second with 11 and then Southampton with 10 bits.

As things stand currently, the end of a product’s lifecycle becomes somebody else’s responsibility, for example, the local government’s waste management department.

Currently consumers and the industry generally don’t do much offboarding experiences or have complete endings, because they do not see it as their responsibility. As things stand currently, the end of a product’s life cycle becomes somebody else’s responsibility, for example, the local government’s waste management department.