Product fitness (opens in new tab)

The best design starts with the purpose. By thinking "what is the purpose of a cotton swab?" or "what is the purpose of the binding on a notebook?" a lot of unnecessary waste can be reduced. Muji is a great example of a company that really designs with purpose over absolutely everything else, and it's reflected in their style and timelessness of their product design.

This page, too. It's not over-designed, and there's plenty of white space and there's nothing superfluous on there.

They picked kind of weird things. Really, really high hanging fruit. The impact of these optimizations would definitely be small, not completely irrelevant but not enough for any one person to notice (unless they like / dislike the changes). This is an interesting way to take on the problem, instead of tackling a huge goal like waste reduction without any concrete attainable results, you create less possible waste to start with. By shortening a cotton swab, you throw less away. You are constrained in how much you can waste by how much is there.

I want to reduce the amount of plastic thrown away each year. I can try to educate the public about what plastic does, where it goes, how it breaks down (hundreds of years), how it's creating an invisible garbage patch in the pacific, but quite frankly, people don't fucking care. We're too small to see the patterns in the hugely complicated system that is the planet. You know how you solve that? Remove the temptation to throw things away, mitigate the trash that needs to be thrown away, and show people the destruction. Or, you could find a way to use that waste.

toilet paper space is easily saved just by not attaching the roll stiffening. obviously you can't hang it then.

johnnie walker originally started making square profile bottles to save space in transport and make them stick firmly to each other so less of them break. some time ago milk (and water) was sold in foil, too bad it all got replaced by plastic crap. I've also read somewhere calculations how much space in transport would be saved if coke bottles were of square profile, but can't find it now.

MUJI does this often, looking at small, often over looked devices and objects, and re-imagines them in a blue-collar yet poetically beautiful way. Their products often strive to be invisible for the same reason.

The third paragraph on that link really sums it up by opening with "MUJI has always been dedicated to the pursuit of adequacy, of designing products that are truly fit for their purpose." Their view of the term adequate is in stark contrast with a modern representation (say, a minimum viable product). Adequate is good.

In a similar vein (from a different perspective), Milton Glaser's 10 Things I have Learned (http://www.miltonglaser.com/milton/c:essays/#4) says the same "Just enough is more"

I like the idea, but I'm not sure how well it would work in reality. Conspicuously absent are examples of products already reduced in size. Airplane seats immediately come to mind.

Love this idea. So obvious yet so fresh. I think it's because we live on autopilot most of the time. We passively accept the things we use as "the way it just is". Or that it's not up to us, or not our responsibility.

Case in point is litter in scenic areas (or anywhere). People just ignore it, even when it's completely in front of them. It's like a negative hallucination. When people do see it, it's not their responsibility and dismiss it. It's so ingrained its almost instant.

The environment, the water is OUR responsibility. Don't leave it for someone else to deal with.