Post by Göksu Kaçaroğlu

What if fast-fashion accessories weren’t designed to end in landfills, but to regenerate life? At my parents' place, I found a small graveyard of cheap €1-store bijoux from my early adolescent years. Plastic cherries with flaking paint, earrings turned green at the tips, and many other useless things that made “fashion” feel affordable when you’re a teen... It made me realize how deeply we've been taught that material abundance should be cheap, temporary, and inherently disposable. Objects back then (and still today) are designed with so little dignity. Long-term environmental toxicity, for short-term consumer satisfaction. But what if a parallel reality for those objects existed right now? At a recent design conference, I was inspired by Simone Rebaudengo from oio studio and their framework of "alternative presents." Instead of looking at "what if" scenarios for the year 2050, they ask: What else is possible today? What alternative presents can we design for the objects of today that are real enough to be true? I decided to apply this approach to jewelry (one of the most intimate human-object interface we have) using the concept of a seed as my muse. In my latest design project, I explore four concepts that transform disposable jewelry into a life-centered system: Biodiversity Boosters: Pieces embedded with wildflower seeds that turn into pollinator gardens when buried. Participatory Design: Customizing jewelry online based on the specific bioregion you want to support. Life-Death-Life Cycle: Memorial pieces that transform the grief of loss into literal ecological regeneration. Co-Habitants: Living interfaces that respond to body warmth and slowly germinate as you wear them. Those cheap bijoux in my childhood tin box weren't just environmentally problematic; they were relationally broken. We need to start designing living interfaces, not just products. The full deep dive into this human-nature interaction design exercise is live now. Read the full background story in the article. The product service system design concept is coming soon - next week! #DesignThinking #SystemsThinking #LifeCenteredDesign #ProductServiceSystemDesign #AlternativePresents #SustainableDesign #InteractionDesign #DesignFiction