Ends. Why we overlook endings for humans, products, services and digital...

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Ready to be inspired? Joe Macleod will be our speaker at this next meetup. He works on the Closure Experiences project (http://www.closureexperiences.com), researching consumer endings. In this role he talks, consults and writes about this important, yet overlooked issue. Most recently publishing the ‘Ends’ book, that captures the historical, societal context that has led to the problems we have with consumer endings, and lays down a common philosophy for improving the ills of consumption.

The talk:
As consumers and providers we overlook the importance of healthy, coherent endings. There was once a rich culture of reflection and responsibility, but over recent centuries this has been lost. Producing a mixture of long term societal oversight, and short term denial. We are left with a bias customer lifecycle that is limited to the exciting vocabulary geared strictly around all things new. Giving rise to guilt-free consumers, an overly-blamed business sector and a society which finds itself at a loss when it needs to grapple with responsibility and consumptions biggest ills.

In a world awash with start-ups and new tech, I want to tell you why its critical we start considering endings.

‘Right to be Forgotten’, is the ambitious law of the European Union that protects a persons rights in a digital world that can’t acknowledge removal of the items we have been encouraged to share.

Nearly 30 years of Climate Change discussion and we still fail to accept the implications of ending our carbon consumption.

Revenge porn, rising anxiety rates in young adults and increasing use of VPNs are reactions from a digital society without a foreseeable end to their digital content.

Lacking a vocabulary to safely dispose of electronics, is there any surprise we only achieve 12.5% recycling of e-waste, despite an increase in sales of consumer electronics and a faster turnover of usage.

Our homes are cluttered with on average 300,000 items. Instead of ending these product relationships, we prefer to seek alternatives in off-site storage - the largest growing real estate sector, according to the New York Times.

We fail to consider endings in services that specifically deal with the end of our lives. In the UK we have on average 11 employers throughout our career, each provides us with a pension pot. According to Age Concern, a UK charity, 1 in 4 of these goes missing just when people need it most.

‘Ends.’ makes a compelling case that demonstrates how, over centuries, our changing relationship with death, spread of the Protestant religion, and a tethering of our identities to our consumption has distanced our relationship with endings.

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The speaker:
Joe Macleod has been working in the mobile design space since 1998 and has been involved in a pretty diverse range of projects. At Nokia he helped develop some of the most streamlined packaging in the world, he created a hack team to disrupt the corporate drone of powerpoint, produced mobile services for pregnant women in Africa and pioneered lighting behavior for millions of phones. For the last four years he has been key to establishing ustwo as the UKs best digital product studio, with 180 people globally in London, New York and Sweden, while also successfully building education initiatives, curriculums and courses on the back of the IncludeDesign campaign which launched in 2013. He now works independently on projects and is currently focusing on his work around Closure Experiences.