Shareability

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One goal of PCD is to design goods, services, and experiences, along with their infrastructures and interfaces of access, toward nonrivalry and/or nonexcludability. To do so requires establishing design criteria such that products, services, systems, and symbols are designed as club goods, commons goods, or public goods, while designing private goods toward nonrivalry or nonexcludability. For private goods and services, this means designing into those goods and services the ways in which they can become either nonrivalrous (club goods) or nonexcludable (common goods). Excludability is typically defined by the material nature of the good, but this doesn’t need to limit its capacity to be designed for shareability, which could make it a club or public good. For example, a bicycle might typically seem to be a private good, but a bike-share system makes a bicycle either common or public, depending on the system of access. This designation doesn’t pertain only to the material design of a good—the bike may be the same—but can be determined by the design of the object’s experience or interaction as well as its “aura” (to use the language of branding) or symbolic value as something common, club, or public. Symbolic value that promotes the sharing or passing of goods around a community could move them along the excludability spectrum in the direction of nonexcludability. Can designers imbue symbolic values into shared goods, making their shareability an asset?