Design, emotion and longer- lasting products - Deliver specific insights to designers how to create emotionally durable products

In a world smothered in people and products, it must be questioned what all this ‘meaningful stuff’ is really for, and why does it transform into ‘meaningless rubbish’ so quickly? We produce 40 tonnes of waste to manufacture one tonne of electronic products. Of that tonne, 98% are discarded within just six months of purchase. Strategies like emotionally durable design help us explore the idea of creating a deeper, more sustainable bond between people and their material things; reducing the consumption and waste of resources by increasing the durability of relationships between users and products. This paper argues that emotionally durable design not only helps designers and manufacturers carve deeper pathways to resource efficiency, but also opens up new innovation possibilities for generating greater levels of brand loyalty and perceived value within customers. Using the metaphor of the ocean, this paper reframes products in terms of depths and shallows of our material experience; taking us from the handful of objects occupying the seldom seen, hadal zone of our deeper material world, to the abundance of material goods occupying the surface, or epipelagic zone