Ends. Why We Overlook Endings for Humans, Products, Services and Digital. And Why We Shouldn’t.

Joe Macleod

Copyright © 2017

All rights reserved.

ISBN 13: 978-9163936449

ISBN 10: 9163936445

Contents

About the author

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

The biased customer lifecycle

The social context of closure

Introduction to chapters 3 & 4

The distancing and the fading

The quickening and the tethering

The psychology of endings

The narrative of endings

Love and marriage…for life?

An intangible tale of services

Saying goodbye to your products

Closure in digital

Business oversight

Conclusion.

Ends. notes

Obligatory author picture

About the author

Joe Macleod has been working on the issue of appropriate endings and closure experiences for fifteen years. Through his work in design, technology and services, he has detected a common pattern of denial at the end of the customer lifecycle. In the last couple of years this interest has led him to establish a research project based on sharing this insight and new approach with people via conferences, articles, teaching, projects and now a book.

His 20-year professional career has been in web, telecoms and carrier companies, where he led teams and built a variety of successful products. Most recently as Head of Design at the award-winning digital product studio Ustwo, he built a globally recognised team, working with the world’s favourite brands on the most pioneering of products.

A regular speaker and commentator of design and design education as well as the founder of the IncludeDesign campaign that brought the UK’s leading designers together to defend creative education.

He now works on the Closure Experiences project; researching, talking, consulting and writing about this important yet overlooked issue.

Acknowledgements

This story couldn’t have happened without the encouragement of Nigel Shardlow, a friend whom I worked with long time ago. He was an early reader of my work who believed in the idea and helped to frame the early concepts.

My work developed and matured, the book started to take form. It would have been difficult to progress this without professional help (especially as I am pretty dyslexic). I would like to thank Kate Goldstone who did early edits and corrections.

Also, I would like to thank Monica Shelley, who has been fantastic as a teacher, editor, contributor and wise sage on consumer affairs. She also happens to be my mother in law.

I would like to thank Danielle Newnham for her inspiring war stories around publishing, and the encouragement to pursue the route of going it alone with self publishing.

Two more people I’d like to thank are Steve Bitten, who I worked with for many years and has been a great help in getting the message out to an audience and Alvaro Arregui, who has been wonderful in providing a vision for the look of the book.

Not to be forgotten are Mills and Sinx of ustwo, and their enormous encouragement in all matters. I have achieved a great deal in the past, infected by their enthusiasm, and the pursuit of this dream was also in some part down to their encouragement.

I would like to mention a dear friend, Chris Downs without whose support, mentoring and inspiration I’d be lost. He has been in the crowd at the events, cheering from the back and an ever-present person in my life.

Finally, I wouldn’t have got anywhere at all without my guide and wife, Alexis, who holds all the family together through her love, encouragement, warmth and happiness.

Preface

Around the early noughties, I had a couple of experiences that would profoundly change my opinion about consumerism and ignite the investigation that I am about to share with you.

The first was using a new service from the mobile phone company Orange. It was a voice recognition avatar/secretary on my phone called Wildfire. It promised to be a pioneering achievement of natural language interface of the time. Orange believed it was going to revolutionise the way we related to technology. I signed up with excitement, believing that I was about to enter into a magical world of pleasant and convenient conversations with an automated assistant.

As with all great technology claims, this one soon faded away when confronted with reality. This particular reality was brought into sharp focus near roads, with heavy traffic. Wildfire couldn’t hear me. The shouting match usually went something like…

Joe: Wildfire. Play answerphone messages.

Wildfire: Sorry, I don’t understand you.

Joe: (louder) Wildfire. Play answerphone messages.

Wildfire: Sorry, I don’t understand you.

Joe: (LOUDER) Wildfire! Play answerphone messages. (Insert curses and rants)

I got to the point where I hated the Wildfire avatar so much, that to terminate the service using the normally emotionless method of simply cancelling it wouldn’t satisfy my anger and frustration. I wanted something more powerful, something more appropriate that matched up to the dreams I had when I responded to the sales pitch and signed up to the service. I wanted to strangle Wildfire until its little avatar eyes flickered, then faded to a dead cold black. I wanted emotional satisfaction in my service ending.

The second experience was teaching students on the graphic design course at Central St Martins in London. I set them a brief around consumer waste for them to practise their skills - it’s something that’s probably been done hundreds of times before in schools and colleges around the world. After gathering into groups they went off to consider the issue, do some research and create their design proposals. Eventually they returned to share their ideas and describe their designs.

Student after student presented their solutions and proposals - but as they did so, they described more and more objects and paraphernalia. Instead of responding to the brief and demonstrating their awareness of the implications of creating more and more waste, they simply added to it. So, although they had responded technically to the brief, they had totally failed to understand the philosophy involved.

These two experiences left me with the clear impression that we don’t have a vocabulary around endings. We have only the language of make more stuff and create more new things.

I grappled with this issue over the years, reflecting on it over my early career and assessing it against the work I was doing. Time and time again I saw this pattern of denial about endings repeat itself. The off-boarding of the customer was being ignored, as was the long term impact of his or her consumption.

Soon after my initial realisation, I had the chance to investigate the issue through a project for one of my clients. This provided the opportunity to answer some basic questions and set down early ideas. The project was well received, one person even saying it was one of the most important pieces of work they had seen.

Although this was reassuring, it was impossible to pursue the issue full time and carry on working for a living. So it became a hobby for many years. When I had read or seen something relevant, then I recorded my reactions and thoughts in sketchbooks, writing down notes and ideas I had around this issue.

Over this time I also saw evidence of the issue through the roles I had in various sectors of the design and tech industries. All of this evidence provided examples of goods and services we sold to customers - all were promoted with wonderful, inspiring starts to the purchase process, yet failed to acknowledge to the customer that these goods and services actually had a lifespan.

At the zenith of the dot.com boom there was total, blinding confidence in technology. Everyone believed that what was being created would last forever! Dubious business models were employed that aspired to change the world, yet ignored the potential lifespan of our creations.

It was great business until it wasn’t and then it really was awful. Work dried up. Panic set in. And we were making people redundant wherever we could.

In the product designer culture of some of the big multi-nationals where I worked, design teams of hundreds of people had enormous budgets to research every detail of all kinds of people, from all types of background, country and culture. But absolutely no attention was paid to what happened to the products when the consumers no longer used them. As a result, millions of phones are now left in drawers, with their owners fearful of what might happen to the data on them and what damage the old phones might do in landfill. They lack the language of endings.

Working in the emergent industry of service design, I was privileged (through some of the leading lights in the industry) to see how the service design approached this issue. Once again we confidently created services that people only ever signed up to, and started. We rarely designed off-boarding or endings.

More recently I found myself back in the digital industry, and this time the business was more mature and responsible than in the wild west of dot.com days. But we still drove businesses to create services that only led people in. How they left these services was never considered. What happened to their data was overlooked. Once again, we were in denial that things came to an end.

Throughout this time the concept of closure experiences was on my mind. Every now and then another piece of the puzzle fell into place and another aspect of culture aligned with my thinking. All the time we were all creating more and more products and services which totally lacked appropriate life cycle endings.

In 2015 my wife and I decided to change our lives around. She wanted to get her career back on track after 9 years of raising our kids, I wanted to spend more time with our two growing boys. I was also keen to deal with this issue - closure experiences - which had been weighing on my mind

The first thing I needed to do was figure out a plan and my goals. Initially, these were fairly basic: research the issue, write about my findings and share this online or through conferences and workshops. I expected this to last about 6 months, and felt I would have exhausted my interest in it by then. However, this is far from being the case, as I have dug into this issue, it has revealed itself to be something far bigger, far more important, and far more complex than I could ever have imagined.

Our relationship with endings has a long and complex history, being shaped by enormous changes in society, from the transition from nomadic wandering to more static societies, to changes in the concept of possession and ownership, to what we imagine heaven to be like, and the significance of funerals. These have influenced our relationship with endings, closure and consumption in Western society today.

I found it immensely intriguing to research the elements and motivations that brought about this bias in our relationship with products and services. I wanted to dig more and more in history and share this fascinating story. What was originally a project to share some thoughts in talks and blog posts became this evangelical mission to get the message out there and tell this story, and change the way we deal with the life history of goods and products.

The Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying) are two related Latin texts dating from about 1415 and 1450 which offer advice on the protocols and procedures of a good death, explaining how to die well according to Christian precepts of the late Middle Ages. Wikimedia Commons

Introduction

"‘Tis impossible to be sure of anything but Death and Taxes,"

Christopher Bullock, The Cobler of Preston (1716)

Taxes? Yes. But death? This may have been the case once, but is it so now? In recent years we have changed the whole approach to the process and permanency of death with the introduction of technology such as breathing machines, complex definitions of brain death and the potential to deep freeze terminal patients in the hope that one day - when more cures are available - they can be re-woken to life.

Emotionally, death and the concept of heaven have lost their meaning for some people as we progress towards a more secular society. And, with the introduction of hospitals and hospices, we are losing the personal experience of death and dying, since few of us are able to be present at the last hours of our loved ones.

This distancing of death has been mimicked in our consumers experiences. As we ignore the (metaphorical) death of the products and services we buy. In contrast, other human made experiences, such as films, books, games, have a clear start, middle and an end. These stimulate thought and meaning to the viewer, reader or player. But in consumer experiences, after we have used a product, exhausted a service, or given up on the latest app, we fail to acknowledge that ending. This means that an important tool for dealing with reflection, meaning and responsibility around consumption has been removed. I would argue that this has fuelled the failures linked to consumption.

The statement ‘Too big to fail’ justified saving the worst of banks in the 2008 crash from their self inflicted endings. Denying that this was the case more and more money was borrowed, and the status quo was propped up, despite the logic of established economics. ‘Right to be Forgotten’, is the ambitious law of the European Union that protects a person’s rights in a digital world which protects itself from loss and refuses to allow us to remove those items that we were persuaded so convincingly to share. There have been nearly 30 years of discussion and debate about climate change - and still we refuse to accept the implications of failing to cut carbon emissions. Long ago we lost the necessary vocabulary, the skills we need to make those vital changes. Once upon a time we had, in contrast to the present day, a rich vocabulary of endings which supported our culture of reflection and responsibility.

In its place we evolved a biased consumer lifecycle that has limited our vocabulary to the description of the new, avoiding the need to discuss death and endings.

This book tells the story of valuable lost endings. It charts the history of endings in our lives and our consuming habits. It argues that a social change in our relationship with endings is responsible for society’s biggest problems. It champions re-engagement with these valuable endings, with increased attention to designing, developing and highlighting them in our consumer experiences.

The story in this book goes back to the early stage in human history when we stopped being nomads, filled our dwellings with goods and products, buried our loved ones with ceremony and goods they might need in the afterlife. It then moves on to the industrial revolution, the birth of commerce and the growth of consumption. The moon landing, the awareness of germs and the atom bomb are shown to contribute to this story. It introduces parallel paths of inspiration that framed our consumer lives, how the mind works, how it relates to death and how it creates meaning in endings. It examples work in the film industry and the way we tell tales in narrative and games.

It carries the argument for improving endings into the current consumer landscape with reflections around the consumption of physical products, the services industry, and the emerging digital industry. It provides specific examples, holding some up as good practice, and others as bad.

The story I tell couldn’t possibly cover all aspects of the argument I am making. On the subject of human death alone there is a lifetime’s worth of research. Instead it touches on many issues to lay the seed of an augment and open the reader’s eyes to alternative approaches to consumption.

Some of the readers of this book might be creators of products, services or digital products, which is a background I have myself. For these people I hope this book inspires you to approach your creations with a different strategy which challenges the accepted and established thought of businesses and environmentalism. With any luck it will empower you to take action positively armed with the insights and arguments spelt out in the chapters that follow.

We are all consumers. This book can aid reflection upon our consumer behaviour in deeper and more profound ways. It aims to frame our behaviour by locating it in the context of a society which has been changing under the influence of centuries of consumerism. I hope this book inspires you to reflect about your own consumption and to see the bias in it.

But most of all I hope that you find this book as interesting to read as I have found it inspiring to write.

Chapter 1

The biased customer lifecycle

We are all consumers. We buy and use products and services, each of which has a life cycle for us spanning from purchase to useless. The way we consume has come a long way from the earliest beginnings, when consumption consisted of a crude transaction or debt: for example, exchanging the corn harvested in autumn for furs to keep the family warm in winter.

Nowadays we buy things on a whim, impulsively, to satisfy an emotional desire which has been constructed by influences embedded in a complicated social hierarchy. This hierarchy has evolved alongside the basic features of modern life such as money, markets, advertising, and its sole aim is to target and inspire consumers to buy the goods that have been created.

This evolution has created many jobs, a great deal of wealth and, you could argue, a certain purpose for the billions of people that now populate this planet. But it has its downside: occasionally and often in the long term, it fails.

The physical aftermath of our consumption of products can be seen in the problems of pollution. Plastic litters the oceans, we discuss the warming of the planet while ice melts. These are the bad outcomes from our consumption, the aftermath that we fail to capture before it leaks into the natural environment around us.

In the world of services the goods supplied are less tangible. They could be the healthcare you receive from a nurse, the plane ride you buy from a travel company or the money management carried out by your bank. Instead of physical waste, here the bad outcomes are less tangible: mis-selling in banking, lost pensions and locked-in gym membership.

Even less tangible are the bad outcomes from the new landscape of the world of digital. You can see examples in the software you have on your computer, the apps you download to your phone and the social media applications you use. The problems arising from this industry often get ignored as they are invisible, hidden on servers, and in your data that companies keep and use in ways that may well cause you anxiety in your daily life.

I see the problems that arise from these different areas of consumption as having the same source. Endings are no longer part of the overall consumer experience. We have moved the source of the problem away from the cause.

As consumers we are able to overlook endings. In business we have built a culture of ignoring them. As students we are taught they are not important. Endings are dodged and left for someone else to clear up. They are broken away from the rest of the experience.

It would be simplistic to assign blame. This is in fact a deep societal problem which has developed over hundreds of years. We have been programmed to ignore endings, to consider only the short term and to deny that endings need to happen.

We need to understand the position we now find ourselves in. It’s not enough to design better endings, although that would be an excellent start. It