Joe Macleod: “Designers should consider the lifecycle of products they create” | Design Week

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Written By Joe Macleod

For decades, the design industry has trained its talent to focus exclusively on product creation and user acquisition. This feature challenges the global design community to take responsibility for the entire lifecycle, showing why true innovation requires designing the exit.

• The global design industry has a systemic blind spot when it comes to the full physical and digital product lifecycle.

• Designers must expand their remit beyond first-use and acquisition to actively script how products retire.

• Unmanaged product endings fuel the growing crises of digital clutter, physical waste, and shifting consumer behavior.

• Elevating product offboarding from a compliance afterthought to a premium design practice benefits both businesses and society.

Joe Macleod

Joe Macleod is founder of the worlds first customer ending business. A veteran of product development industry with decades of experience across service, digital and product sectors.

Head of Endineering at AndEnd. TEDx Speaker. Wired says “An energetic Englishman, Macleod advises companies on how to game out their endgames. Every product faces a cycle of endings. It's important to plan for each of them. Not all companies do." Fast Company says “Joe Macleod wants brands to focus on what happens to products at the end of their life cycle—not just for the environment but for the entire consumer experience.”

He is author of the Ends book, that iFixIt called “the best book about consumer e-waste”. And the new book –Endineering, that people are saying “defines and maps out a whole new sub-discipline of study”. The DoLectures consider the Endineering book one of the best business books of 2022.

https://www.andend.co
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