Category: Ideas

Unbuy: An exploration in anti-consumption

Early last year, I was trying to figure out a way to help people reduce their personal material consumption and landed on a concept called Unbuy. Unbuy is a service that helps you set goals, reduce your impact, and save money by buying less.

Unbuy focuses on the first word of the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ mantra – reducing consumption at its core. Here’s how it works:

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Reflections and highlights from the New Economy conference 2018

I recently joined the New Economy Network Australia conference for three days here in Melbourne. It was fantastic – you can find the program here (pdf). I’ll cover some of my reflections and highlights from the conference below.

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On embodied emissions, exploitation and the unsustainability of consumer products

One core feature of globalised capitalism is that supply and demand, production and consumption are geographically separated. Consumers buying physical products have very little visibility into the supply chain and the participating organisations beyond the maker (the public brand) and the seller (the place of purchase). As consumers, we tend to stick with the story crafted by marketing and advertising, and assessing the sustainability of a product beyond this superficial understanding is a challenge we are not encouraged to take on.

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Minimum Viable Product: Build a slice across, instead of one layer at a time

This is my most popular tweet of all time: ‘Minimum Viable Product: Build a slice across, instead of one layer at a time’.

The intention of the diagram is to show an alternative approach to MVP compared to the ‘traditional’ way of building products from the bottom up.

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