The Creativity of Everyday Products: A Systemic Design Approach

Purpose – This paper presents a design approach based on holistic diagnosis and the formulation of alternative scenarios. The refrigerator serves as a case study to address some critical points and potentialities highlighted by the preliminary analysis.

Design/methodology/approach – It combines various ethnographic methods (fridge studies, fridge stories, shop-along, at-home visits and interviews, food mapping and diaries studies) to the Systemic Design approach and Alternative Nows for investigating alternative scenarios.

Originality/value – How can creativity in redesigning consolidated objects such as refrigerators be increased? How can we change our perspective and approach to allow us to see things in different ways?  The paper shows in detail the design process that leads to four speculative scenarios, namely the distributed refrigerator, the inside/outside refrigerator, the social refrigerator, and the locked refrigerator, dealing with how the initial critical issues were addressed.