Designer responsibility

To the client who pays, to the community that lives with the product, and to the environment that supplies and absorbs it. Almost every decision reaches all three.

Because a per-unit improvement can be an overall loss. A bottle using 18% less plastic but replaced twice as often uses more material across a year.

Welding an earcup shut is chosen for cost and thinness, and it decides that any fault scraps the whole product. Most environmental damage is a side effect of a decision about something else.

Four questions asked before a decision is fixed: who else lives with this, for how long, what would change it, and can I say why.

A hazard, a test and a limit — so the same product either passes or does not, and two people can agree about the result.

Design the hazard out; if it must exist, guard or interlock it; warn only when neither is possible. Relying on the user is never a safety measure.

Every clause exists because something went wrong somewhere, usually to somebody. No individual designer could discover all of those hazards alone.

That the product is safe for your users in your context. A standard written for adults says nothing about a nursery, and one tested dry says nothing about wet hands.

Planned, functional, technological, style and social. What separates them is what actually ended the product.

Functional means it genuinely broke and cannot economically be repaired. Planned means the useful life was deliberately limited by a design decision.

Measuring a product against people, profit and planet rather than profit alone. Obsolescence is where the three conflict most sharply.

A long-lived product builds the reputation the next one is sold on, avoids total warranty replacements, and avoids legal exposure as repairability rules spread.