What Kinds of Products Do Our Economic Systems Produce?

Industrial design has traditionally focused on improving products. Designers seek to enhance function, usability, manufacturability, durability, and, increasingly, environmental performance. Over the past several decades, sustainability has expanded this agenda to include life-cycle thinking, material efficiency, repairability, modularity, and circular product development. These developments have significantly broadened the contribution industrial design can make to addressing environmental challenges.

My own work has largely been situated within this tradition. Much of my professional experience has involved circular product development, where questions of repairability, product lifetime, recycled materials, disassembly, and resource efficiency became central to everyday design practice. These remain important questions, and they continue to shape much of the contemporary discourse surrounding sustainable product development.

At the same time, my reading increasingly extended beyond industrial design. What began as an interest in circular economy expanded into Earth-system science, ecological economics, and sustainability transitions research. Rather than offering a single explanation of sustainability, these fields presented different ways of understanding the relationships between economies, societies, and the biophysical systems upon which they depend. Reading across them gradually changed the questions I found myself asking.

Industrial design has often asked how products can become more sustainable. Ecological economics, by contrast, frequently asks how societies might organise production, consumption, and human wellbeing within ecological limits. These are closely related discussions, but they begin from different points of departure.

As I read across these perspectives, I found myself returning to one question that has continued to shape my thinking:

What kinds of products do our economic systems produce?

This is not to suggest that economic systems literally manufacture products. Rather, they shape the conditions under which products are conceived, developed, produced, used, maintained, and eventually discarded. They influence what is considered valuable, which innovations receive investment, how organisations operate, and which forms of production become commercially viable. Over time, these conditions make certain kinds of products more likely than others. Industrial designers rarely design economic systems themselves, yet they continually design within them. Understanding how those systems shape product development may therefore be just as important as understanding the products themselves.

This question has become increasingly relevant as the scientific understanding of ecological limits has evolved. Research on Planetary Boundaries suggests that several Earth-system processes have already moved beyond levels considered compatible with maintaining a stable and resilient Earth system (Richardson et al., 2023). At the same time, the International Resource Panel continues to report rising global material extraction despite decades of improvements in resource efficiency, while the IPBES Nexus Assessment highlights the interconnections between climate change, biodiversity loss, freshwater, food systems, and human wellbeing. Collectively, this research suggests that economic activity is increasingly taking place within recognised biophysical limits rather than against assumptions of continual ecological abundance.

These developments have stimulated a growing diversity of responses within economics and sustainability research. Green growth argues that technological innovation, renewable energy, and efficiency improvements can enable continued economic development while reducing environmental pressures. Circular economy research focuses on retaining the value of products and materials through strategies such as repair, reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling. More recently, initiatives such as the Global Circularity Protocol for Business have positioned circularity as an organisational capability requiring governance, measurement, and strategic decision-making rather than simply improved waste management.

Alongside these perspectives, ecological economists have questioned whether efficiency improvements alone can deliver the absolute reductions in material throughput required to remain within planetary boundaries. This has contributed to growing scholarship on post-growth, degrowth, and a-growth, each of which offers a different perspective on the relationship between economic activity, prosperity, and environmental sustainability. Although these perspectives differ substantially, they share a willingness to reconsider long-held assumptions about growth, value, and human wellbeing.

As a practitioner working in industrial product development, I found myself wondering what these debates might mean for the everyday decisions designers make.

What struck me while reading across these fields is how rarely these debates intersect directly with industrial design. The discipline has produced an extensive body of knowledge on sustainable products, circular design, product-service systems, emotional durability, repairability, and design for longevity. These contributions have fundamentally changed how designers approach environmental challenges. Yet comparatively little discussion considers how different economic assumptions might influence the kinds of products societies choose to develop.

If economic systems define value differently, might they also encourage different forms of product development?

My experience in product development has reinforced rather than resolved these questions. Decisions concerning repairability, durability, maintenance, and accessibility were rarely determined by technical considerations alone. They emerged through interactions between manufacturing capabilities, commercial priorities, regulatory requirements, service systems, supply chains, and user expectations. The product itself was only one part of a much larger system. Looking back, I realised that many of the decisions shaping a product had already been made before designers began sketching concepts.

This article is not an attempt to answer that question. Rather, it explains why it has become the question that increasingly shapes my thinking. The more I have read across Earth-system science, ecological economics, and industrial design, the more I have become convinced that sustainability cannot be understood through products alone.

Industrial design has much to contribute to these debates. Equally, I believe these debates have much to contribute to industrial design.

For me, that conversation continues to begin with one question:

If the conditions surrounding product development are changing, what kinds of products do our economic systems produce?

References

Industrial Design and Design for Sustainability

Bocken, N. M. P., Short, S. W., Rana, P., & Evans, S. (2014). A literature and practice review to develop sustainable business model archetypes. Journal of Cleaner Production, 65, 42–56.

Ceschin, F., & Gaziulusoy, İ. (2020). Design for Sustainability: A Multi-Level Framework from Products to Socio-Technical Systems. Routledge.

Chapman, J. (2021). Meaningful Stuff: Design That Lasts. MIT Press.

Geissdoerfer, M., Savaget, P., Bocken, N. M. P., & Hultink, E. J. (2017). The Circular Economy — A new sustainability paradigm? Journal of Cleaner Production, 143, 757–768.

Manzini, E. (2015). Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. MIT Press.

Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.

Earth-System Science

IPBES. (2024). The Assessment Report on the Interlinkages Among Biodiversity, Water, Food and Health (Nexus Assessment).

Richardson, K., Steffen, W., Rockström, J., et al. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances, 9(37), eadh2458.

Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., et al. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461, 472–475.

United Nations Environment Programme, International Resource Panel. (2024). Global Resources Outlook 2024: Bend the Trend — Pathways to a Liveable Planet as Resource Use Spikes.

Ecological Economics

Hickel, J. (2020). Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. Penguin.

Jackson, T. (2021). Post Growth: Life After Capitalism. Polity.

Kallis, G. (2018). Degrowth. Agenda Publishing.

Raworth, K. (2022). Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (Updated ed.). Chelsea Green.

van den Bergh, J. C. J. M. (2017). A third option for climate policy within potential limits to growth. Nature Climate Change, 7(2), 107–112.

Circular Economy and Business

Circle Economy Foundation. (2026). The Circularity Gap Report 2026: The Value Gap.

United Nations Environment Programme, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, & One Planet Network. (2026). Global Circularity Protocol for Business (Version 1.0).