Engineering and Product Design Education
September 2015
Loughborough, England
J Drew Smith, Bryan Howell, and David Morgan
The sharing economy is gaining momentum and changing the way people think about and interact with products. The commercial economy has created a culture of conspicuous consumption, where status is displayed by owning lots of stuff. But the sharing economy encourages collaborative consumption where status comes from having access to a lot of goods [1]. In the sharing economy, companies use technology to facilitate peer-to-peer rental schemes [2]. These “using rather than owning” strategies have the potential to reduce our demand for natural resources, and revive the old virtue of building products that last [3]. For this reason it is important that design students be exposed to courses, lectures, and projects where they learn to design for the unique challenges of the sharing economy.