Sustainable and useful products.

Phileppe Starck believes that "in future every designer will have to ensure that what they create is both useful and sustainable"

I believe that it's important for a designers products to be useful and sustainable as it will have a negative effect on the enviroment, if they aren't. It needs to be useful because as a designer you want to create a product that will always be wanted, needed and popular. There is not point designing an apron that absorbs water, your want it to be made with a water resistant finish. Otherwise, it's useless, and is likely to be chucked away. This isn't good for our enviroment and econnomy as it's wasting materials and money.

When creating a product it's function is one of the most important factors when it comes to designing and planning it, you can't create something which you can't adapt to it's feature. For example and iPod touch, Apple wanted to create a touch screen item, which also played music. Those were the two main factors which the product needed, however there are a lot of other product which play music and also are touch screen, this is why they gave it all the other axtra features, for example, a camera, apps, video player. All these features made it a lot more useful, and thefore helped the product sell. 

It's important when you are designing to think about the enviromental features, if your product is sustainable or not. You need to think if you want your product to be long lasting or a piece of throw-away fashion, it's a lot more helpful on the enviroment and social factors if your product is high quality and long lasting. Something that will last for a long time can either be kept, made into something else, sold on or passed down families. This will reduce waste and not have a negative impact on the enviroment. When creating a product you want to consider that waste which you'll be creating, for example fabric cut-offs, instead of just chucking them away you could keep them and resuse them, or give them to someone e.g. children for doing crafts. There is always something that can altured to help the enviroment when creating a product. 

Overall I think that it is important for your product to be useful and sustainable as you want your product to be the best it can we, have as little impact on the enviroment as possible and to be as long lasting as possible.