Ingredients for a product

At this moment the general fashion designer is a sensory experience designer; How does an item feel, how does it look? Smell? Hear? So in short how does the user experiences a garment? This is a fulltime job already. Next to these designers an eco-effective designer will start to exist. Who thinks about which materials are environment friendly? How do we design them in such a way they are easy to separate? How can we get back our materials after use?

Both designers will work on the functionality of an object only from a different perspective. And both have influence on the looks of the final product. For example: An environment friendly technique can be very dominant for the looks. (Think of lasercutting instead of silkscreen printing)

I made a scheme that shows which ingredients a product needs.
This can be a start if the product-idea (which product are we going to make) is already there. The questions mentioned are just a few examples to show the differences in approach.

To create the idea I recommend that designers start working with engineers, biologists, psychologists and anthropologists to really solve the problems instead of curing symptoms.

And what if the idea will be a service in which the user does not owns the product but only uses the functionality? In the end we still need a product to deliver the service.

Click on the picture to enlarge the scheme.
Revised version: 10th November 2012