What is Nonliving Stakeholders?
What is it?
Nonliving Stakeholders is a perspective of regarding the objects as beings like humans to rethink the human attitude and responsibility towards objects. (The objects refer to man-made products in this context.)
Why do we need this perspective?
Objects have been indispensable elements in the environmental discourses as a cause of environmental damage. However, the actors who have created and used the objects are humans. They(we!) have laid their environmental responsibility to the objects to maintain the convenience.
In dressing up products just to persuade people to buy them, design has contributed, and still contributes, to an everlasting flood of new products. But now design can play an active part in stemming that flood.
- Dieter Rams
This idea is not about personifying the objects.
Instead, it is more about acknowledging them as they are.
Story
The concept started by Sungmy Kim, as her Master's thesis project in Transdisciplinary Design program at Parsons School of Design. Based on her root in South Korea and expertise in industrial design, her interests always lie in the relationship between humans and objects and designer's social responsibility.
With her empathic ability and the eastern perspective of ecology, this project successfully addresses the needs of eastern mindset in the design discipline to overcome the limit of current environmental approaches.