As a very concerned citizen of earth, I want to know “How bad am I?”
As a consumer I know, on many levels, how good I am. Identity and measurement are embedded and celebrated throughout purchase and usage. But at the end, identity is removed and measuring consumer impact becomes a complicated personal math project.
As a UX community, over the last 20 years, we have built some pretty amazing systems of identity and measurement to help consumerism. Fridges that measure contents and order from a supermarket account. Yet, we fail to measure food waste in a user-centric way. Travel services that predict and automate for the ideal journey. Yet, we fail to measure carbon from a holiday in a user-centric way. Sharing videos, images and opinions with millions of people instantly. Yet identifying and removing hateful content seems widely complicated.
Justice between personal consumer behavior and climate change’s poorest victims is impossible in the current broken system. Climate impact comparisons between countries remove the individual consumer responsibility. Personal identity attached to consumption would help all of us understand our roles. Measurement systems would help us see our own impact and improve our behavior.
These two critical issues will help all of us answer “How bad am I?”. And to know how much better we can get.
__________
Joe Macleod
Joe Macleod is the founder and Head of Endineering at AndEnd – the world’s first customer-ending business. He is a veteran of the product development industry with decades of experience across service, digital and product sectors. He now specializes 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.
Macleod is author of the Ends book, which established this new design genre in 2018. iFixIt 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.”
He has recently released a new book – Endineering, that people are saying “defines and maps out a whole new sub-discipline of study”. Macleod now trains some of the world’s leading businesses in bringing a wonderful end to their product experiences.
