Emotionally Durable Design

Emotionally Durable Design presents counterpoints to our ‘throwaway society’ by developing powerful design tools, methods, and frameworks that build resilience into relationships between people and things. The book takes us beyond the sustainable design field’s established focus on energy and materials to engage the underlying psychological phenomena that shape patterns of consumption and waste.

In fluid and accessible writing, the author asks: why do we discard products that still work? He then moves forward to define strategies for the design of products that people want to keep for longer. Along the way, we are introduced to over twenty examples of emotional durability in smartphones, shoes, chairs, clocks, teacups, toasters, boats, and other material experiences.

Emotionally Durable Design transcends the prevailing doom and gloom rhetoric of sustainability discourse, to pioneer a more hopeful, meaningful, and resilient form of material culture. This second edition features pull-out quotes, illustrated product examples, a running glossary, and comprehensive stand firsts. This book can be read cover to cover, or dipped in and out of. It is a daring call to arms for professional designers, educators, researchers, and students from a range of disciplines from product design to architecture, framing an alternative genre of design that reduces the consumption and waste of resources by increasing the durability of relationships between people and things.