Joe Macleod is the founder of the world’s first customer ending business. (Oh, he was also head of design at Ustwo a few years ago.) A veteran of the product development industry with decades of experience across service, digital, and product sectors.
These are live-blogged notes from a session at NEXT25 in Hamburg. Posts will be improved over the next few days.
Joe used to design beginnings and middles, but now he designs endings. He even wrote a book about it. Why? Because endings matter to people.
Throughout history, across cultures, we tell ourselves a story about a world beyond life where we have indulgence and abundance. These are stories about the consumption you deserve at the end. But now, across the world, we’re experiencing a form of heaven on earth, with an abundance of stuff to buy, to consume. And we’re great at consuming.
But we’re also worried about the consequences of that consumption, with over-extraction and other impacts, particularly on the climate. In the pre-industrial world, our relationship with waste was closer. Scraps from the table went to the animals. Waste from the animals went on the crops. The crops went on the table, creating scraps, restarting the cycle. We still talk about circularity of materials – but not of experiences.
Endings and Consequences
We focus on on-boarding and recruitment, but not on consequences and endings. That’s opened up a gulf between our consumer self, and our civil self, which is worried about the impact of what our consumer self is doing.
And that’s not the only problem. The Internet was designed to be bomb-proof. And we’ve been making it easier to use, and cheaper and cheaper to put stuff on the Internet. But that means we’ve ended up with vast quantities of meaningless stuff online. We don’t spend the few seconds it takes to decide what to delete. But the ability to forget has been lost. We can’t forget now because so much has been recorded and stored.
The internet is full of so many trees, it’s impossible to see the forest.
Completing the life-cycle
The consumer life cycle is built of:
- On-boarding
- Usage
- Off-boarding
We’ve created remarkable brands and stories that encourage people to on-board and use. However, off-boarding has been left to legislation and chemical consequences. One of the biggest issues we have is the lack of vocabulary around endings. We have so much nuance and language around the product itself. But there’s a sad lack of consideration, empathy and thought at the end of the consumer lifecycle.
Humans love narratives. It’s the primary way we communicate between generations. We tell consumers the stories of products, but never talk about the end. The end of stories is what ties them all together, which adds meaning and purpose.
Rethinking digital object permanence
Children love peekaboo because they don’t have object permanence. They don’t understand that you exist when they can’t see you. In digital, we create a story about files in a folder on our computers, but we’ve been changing that with the rise of the cloud. The ownership of objects has become more shared and questioned.
If I want to get rid of a chair, it sits there, reminding you, until you get rid of it. With digital subscriptions, we get bank notifications, that can trigger us to end that relationship when we realise we’re still paying for it. But with files, they can just exist, forgotten, in the cloud.
The Industrial Revolution was initially a bloodbath, as people fell into machines and died. So, we invented guardrails and then kill switches. A simple thing we could hit to stop it. In digital services, there are laws and contracts to govern how we shut things down.
How to find an ending
We should be worried about our ability to spot what needs ending, and then our ability to end it well. And our ability to have a kill switch has moved further and further away from us into the cloud.
Do you want people to use a product only because they can’t leave it? If you’re a CEO in that situation, you hate your product and your consumers. It’s like throwing a party, and trapping guests in cupboards so they don’t leave.
3 in Denmark added a glorious exit process. Transparent Speaker implies its end in its very design. Fairphone looks forward to the end of the phone.
And then there’s death. In life, we align with brands and products, and they define us. But in death, it undermines us. In Ukraine, a project was created to produce art featuring people who had died, along with the items they purchased in the time leading up to their death. The consumerism that it shows often doesn’t reflect well on them, as a memorial of their life.
Memorials are about celebrating greatness, but also complex stories about how they achieve that greatness. Endings can build reflection and responsibility. We need better ones.
