"Heirloom design"

Abby sent me a copy of Good magazine for my birthday. This is taken from Winter 2010, The Slow Issue.

Here is an excerpt of an interview with an inventor, Saul Griffith, talking about “heirloom design.” It is, I suppose, how everything was made until 60 years ago, but now we need it reintroduced.

GOOD: What do you mean by “heirloom design?”
SAUL GRIFFITH: An object with “heirloom design” is something that will not only last through your lifetime and into the next generation, but that you also desire to keep that long because it’s beautiful, functional, and timeless.

G: How do you design an heirloom product? Do you have to think about function, materials, and aesthetics differently?
SG: The principal and only way to make an heirloom product is to design something that people will need not just this year, but for the next 50 or 100 years. Choose good materials that will last that long; but in essence, don’t even bother making fad products. If you have to design something, choose things that we need as opposed to frivolous things that we might just want for a month or two for bragging rights. In many respects, designing heirloom products means saying no to designing consumer crap that you know will not last very long.

G: What makes an object something a consumer actually wants to hold on to for generations? Its cost? Its craftsmanship?
SG: Probably both. I don’t think this is an easy question to answer, and the answer is different for different people. I would, however, point that a key ingredient is functionality. If an object performs its function beautifully, efficiently, an intuitively, it is likely an heirloom product. If not, you shouldn’t make it.

Think about the beautiful timeless objects: Le Crueset pots and pans, Bialetti or Bodum coffee makers, Iittala glassware, Vespa motor scooters, the Citroen 2CV, the Volkswagen Beetle, Lego toys, Zippo cigarette lighters, Montblanc pens, the Land Rover (the old aluminum ones before the queen bought one), the older KitchenAid products…

I don’t want to be called elitist. These typically sound like high-end products. But the reality is we need to figure out how to help people pay for higher-quality things up front, and have them last longer. This is a solvable problem with new business models.

G: What about the dictates of fashion? I have some old clothes I still like, but styles change. Isn’t there an aesthetic imperative to update what you own?
SG: Suck it up. We have to change. That’s the gig with climate change. [He also talks about "embodied energy," the amount of energy we use for things we dispose of quickly.] We have to do things in new ways and think differently. That’s an opportunity for people with their eyes open. Planned obsolescence and fashion seasons are new and constructed problems. There is no reason why we can’t do things differently. In fact, if you care about the environment and climate change, we sort of have no choice. You can ride this wave to success, or you can stick with your current mental model of the world and fail.