Interview by Will Evans, Semantic Foundary
In anticipation of next week's DMI Design at Scale conference, Will Evans sat down to chat with Cameron Tonkinwise, Associate Dean for Sustainability at Parsons The New School of Design. Tonkinwise will be speaking at DMI about recent advances in collaborative consumption and the rise of the sharing economy. Here, Tonkinwise gives us a some background on these topics in the context of his academic background and the rise of social sharing service systems.
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Will Evans: So Cameron, how did become interested in exploring these ideas of collaborative consumption?
Cameron Tonkinwise: So, it is kind of a long and tedious story. I was doing an arts PhD at Sydney University studying Heidegger, heavily under the influence of post-structuralism. Soon, most of the post-structuralists academics left and it returned to more traditional discourse, which left me looking. So I went to work with Tony Fry [Ed Note: The British design theorist and philosopher] and finished my PhD in design. Now, the Eco Design Foundation , a think tank, that was trying to advance sustainable design as a kind of topic worthy of thinking. We partnered with companies, arguing that what matters most is to think about greening systems rather than just greening products.
During that time, I spent a lot of time trying to work out what are green economies, what are sustainable economies, and caught onto the idea of decoupling use and ownership. At that point the Europeans started doing a lot of work on what they were calling "product service systems." PSS are a 'dematerialization strategy' for the European economy—a way of getting growth but with less material impact.
And PSS decouples ownership with use...
Right—and you also increase the quality of the services while decreasing the quantity of material stuff. I got heavily involved in that movement and saw my job in the early '00s as basically importing European discourse into an Australian context.
If a lot of this research is rather dated back to the early '00s, why do topics like sharing economies and collaborative consumption seem like the hot new topic these days?
It's amazing. It's really incredible because most of this research is ten-to-fifteen years old, but transferred to the United States it seems like cutting edge.
So many people are aware of the more notable examples here in the States, new business models like AirBnB or ZipCar—were these the first examples of collaborative consumption or sharing examples here?
Not at all. There was a bit of it in America, strangely enough, with the chemicals management industry. So when people start spilling chemicals on a farm and it kills thousands of fish, nobody blames the farmer. Everybody blames Dow Chemicals. Dow started thinking that, in addition to selling the chemicals to these farmer they should also go down there and help the farmer store it and say, "Look, you need to build a shed and you need a little dispenser and make sure you don't kick it over." The innovation came when they decided that they could sell pest control to farmers—not chemicals, which meant they could control how their chemicals where used, with the added benefit of their profit motive moving from selling more chemicals to using less.