Above & Beyond: Rethinking our responsibility as both designers and consumers in a talk with Fairphone
This article was written by Renee Semko Gonzalez and edited by Zoey Tsopela. A special thank you goes out to our guest speaker, Miquel Ballester, the co-founder of Fairphone. We hope to welcome you to Above again!
This year’s penultimate Above and Beyond talk brought our team together with the curious mind of Miquel Ballester, co-founder and design lead at Fairphone, a social enterprise company that develops smartphones with minimal environmental impact. From the get-go, Miquel made it clear Fairphone doesn’t aim to be a niche phone option for the ultra-environmentally conscious consumer. They aim to be the go-to phone option for all consumers.
In his talk, Miquel showed this video clip of American economist Milton Friedman summarizing how a seemingly simple product, the pencil, is actually the result of thousands of peoples’ time and labor spread out across the globe.
The point Miquel was making with the Friedman example was, by all appearances, a simple one: we don’t quite realize the full extent of what resources go into making the products we use on a daily basis, like our phones. In fact, a lot needs to happen before components we might recognize in our products even make it to the assembly line. Products’ lives don’t begin assembly in manufacturing factories. They begin, largely, in the ground.
While Friedman describes the hidden structures involved in creating the products we use as ‘harmonious’ and ‘peaceful,’ the realities of today’s supply chains are, sadly, much bleaker. The harvesting of common materials like graphite found in phones (and pencils, ironically) is a complex process riddled with problematic ethics issues like poor working conditions or sourcing from conflict areas.
But, we don’t think about these things when we, as consumers, contemplate buying the latest iPhone or Android. We think about camera specs or what color best suits our personalities, rather than the thousands of individuals involved in helping make the phone.
Rather than putting the blame on consumers, however, Miquel offered a more introspective consideration: how had we, as designers, contributed to the ethics and sustainability issues plaguing the phone industry?
Much like Miquel’s earlier point about consumers not thinking about how time and labor goes into our products, designers’ priorities and attention often fall on aesthetic or experiential values that neglect and detriment our planet and/or humanity. This focus lives with a fairly closed system that starts and stops the users, ignoring the complex mess of systems that are ultimately impacted by those aesthetic/experiential choices.
While designers may not have a directive in monitoring labor wages in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, they are not powerless in changing the system. In fact, many believe designers are responsible for creating the system in the first place. Mike Monteiro points out in his book Ruined by Design that designers possess a powerful tool in choice, and it is ultimately our responsibility to wield it wisely.
“These negative aspects of these systems, Monteiro says, aren’t bugs. They’re the result of the system operating 100% as intended. They were, as he says with conviction throughout the book, designed that way.”- Ross Floate, Only spines can save us now.
To point the finger at ourselves as the source of sustainability problems within the ICT industry is not a light thing to grapple with. Luckily for us, Miquel also provided some examples, summarized below, of how Fairphone uses design and tech as the catalyst for major industry upheaval and change:
🧠 Exist outside of traditional “design” spheres
Throughout the discussion, Miquel repeatedly referred to the fact Fairphone positions itself between supply and demand. Being straddled between two worlds, so to speak, allows Fairphone omnipresence at every phase in a product’s life, beginning in the ground. They have social initiative and partnerships working with artisanal mining and have created a guide for fair materials to focus on.
This supply chain expertise and involvement are crucial for Fairphone’s design process. How can you create a sustainable phone if you don’t fully understand where the materials you want to use come from and, more importantly, if there are more ethical, sustainable options available to you? In this respect, the design process needs to start at the beginning of the supply chain, on the ground, not at a desk or an ideation meeting.
🧠 Use products as artifacts for lifestyle change
Another point Miquel reiterated a few times during our discussion was leveraging the symbolic power of the phone. He advocated for using a product as an artifact for raising awareness for a bigger goal. In Fairphone’s case, the phone serves as an artifact for several “bigger goals,” including how we consume, view ownership, and think about sustainability. Above’s Sustainability Manager Johanna Tunlid pointed out that consumers often know more than they let on about sustainability. “When we do user interviews, users rarely bring up sustainability themselves. But, if you ask them about it, they’re surprisingly knowledgeable about what they’re consuming and what goes into their products. That knowledge will only increase,” she explains. Consequently, as designers, we should think about how we’re creating products and artifacts for change.
🧠 Democratize repairing or upgrading products yourself
In a discussion that was undoubtedly frank and open, the question was posed to Abovers, “what would it take for you to change to using a Fairphone?” The answers varied, from being “lazy consumers comfortable in their Apple bubble” to not knowing enough about Fairphone’s tech specs. One response from our UX Design Technologist Felix Heibeck, who’s had a lot to say on designing consumer electronics in the past, particularly caught our attention:
“One of the main differences that I see is that Fairphone asks people to engage with the hardware of their product — not just see it as a necessary medium for the experience you have on it. It’s about suspending disbelief about being able to open, repair or upgrade a phone yourself. There should be more awareness around how [Fairphone’s] modular design enables people to do things without advanced technical knowledge.”
While the product itself may serve as an artifact for bigger change or momentum, Fairphone users should also be aware of the agency the product gives them as consumers: the power to repair and upgrade without required expertise. The democratization of product maintenance should afford a larger, more inclusive consumer group, both in terms of education level but also socio-economic status.
The takeaways and discussion topics from this particular Above & Beyond were varied, aspirational, and, at times, blunt. Yet, the red thread connecting the discussion was, ultimately, awareness. For us as designers, it was an awareness of our role and responsibility to extend our design process thinking to the thousands of people involved in making the materials we later consider during the prototyping and ID phases of our work. For us as consumers, it was an awareness of the ability to fix and upgrade the things we already own rather than buying new things instead. We want to think that with this awareness comes power. After all, as Miquel wisely said, “we decide with our money what business goals we want in the world.”
📣 Share your thoughts on our collaborative process with Fairphone or your business challenges with us: hello@above.se
✍️And if you are interested in being part of the next Above & Beyond, send us a few lines here: zoey.tsopela@above.se.
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