You’ll be designing a proposed innovation that supports or promotes sustainable behaviors and practices for INDIVIDUALS in day-to-day use.
Please share your initial thoughts in a few paragraphs below…
The domain I will focus on is…
Essential consumer products for children, specifically clothes and shoes, which get quickly outgrown and turned over. For families with just one child, multiple children of the same age, or children of different genders, the amount of items they buy for their children adds up to a lot - physically, environmentally, and economically. It’s easy for adults to have clothes and shoes that last, especially if bought with good quality and craftmanship in mind, but the same can’t be said for children’s items. Children outgrow clothes and shoes fast, but what if there was a way to make these items last buy growing with your child?
My goal with this domain is to focus on extending product longevity and use, specifically related to children’s items. My main MVP features will be:
- flexible, extendable designs
- resources/incentives for easy repair
- made from quality materials that are made to last, easy to clean, and sustainably-sourced.
This area is important/interesting to me because….
Having three younger siblings and seeing the amount of waste that my family generates because of it means that I’ve seen the issue of consumption up close-and-personal. I’ve been able to see the nuances of the issue too, like that it doesn’t come from a place of ill-intent but simply happens out of necessity. For families whose goal is just to make ends meet on a daily basis, they need convenience. What this usually ends up looking like is having lots of cheap-costing, cheaply-made items (i.e. fast fashion…) so that you have backup when something rips, gets stained, becomes too small, etc. Elizabeth Segran reports in her article on the children’s disposable fashion industry that “Carter’s and Gerber sell bulk packs of cotton onesies for between $2 and $4 a pop. Target sells stretchy fashion-forward leggings for $6. Given how inexpensive they are, parents have no incentive to mend tears or scrub out stains from diaper leaks—they can just toss the garment in the trash.”