What if Objects Had Rights?

Picture this: you’re sitting in a courtroom. The fluorescent lights hum overhead. The room is quiet in that tense, anticipatory way.

Across from you sits a coffee table.

The charge? Premeditated obsolescence.

The table claims you knew it wouldn’t last. It argues that you chose particleboard over solid wood. That you specified plastic veneers destined to peel, trendy forms destined to date, and proprietary screws that ensured it could never be disassembled. It argues that its short lifespan wasn’t an accident—it was embedded in the CAD drawings, the budget, and the production timeline.

It says you designed it with an expiration date.

And suddenly, the questions we ask about design shift.

Not: Is it beautiful?

Not: Will it sell?

But: Did you intend for it to survive?

If objects had rights, design wouldn’t just be about innovation—it would be about intent. And I don’t mean symbolic rights or sentimental ones. I mean actual, enforceable rights.

The Object Bill of Rights

• The right to be repaired: Access to the parts, tools, and manuals necessary for healing.

• The right to graceful degradation: The right not to be permanently fused into something unrecoverable with toxic glues.

• The right to material reincarnation: The right to be safely returned to the earth or cleanly separated for a next life.

• The right to outlive a single trend cycle.

As a designer, that framework doesn’t feel abstract. It feels uncomfortably close to home. Because most of what we make today would fail that test.

A Precedent for Personhood

This idea isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. We already grant legal personhood to abstract entities like corporations. In recent years, the "Rights of Nature" movement has successfully argued that rivers, mountains, and forests possess inherent legal rights to exist, thrive, and evolve.

Why shouldn't the things we extract from that nature—the wood, the metals, the silicates—retain a fraction of those rights once we mold them into products? The burgeoning "Right to Repair" legislation sweeping across the globe is the first quiet rumbling of this exact philosophy. It is the beginning of objects demanding agency.

Answering to More Than Demand

When I think about this, I keep coming back to Victor Papanek. In Design for the Real World, he argued that design is one of the most powerful—and potentially harmful—professions because it shapes how we live, consume, and discard. He criticized designers for creating wasteful, unnecessary products that serve marketing more than people.

If objects had rights, Papanek’s critique would feel less like a warning and more like a foundation. It would formalize the idea that designers are ethically responsible not only to users, but to the things they bring into existence. Aesthetics and profit wouldn’t be enough. Every object would carry moral weight.

Designing Backward

Most products today are designed forward: toward launch, toward market, toward sale. The timeline ends at the point of purchase, as if that’s the finish line. Very few are designed backward from their end.

But if objects had rights, end-of-life wouldn’t be an afterthought; it would be the starting point. We would begin by asking:

• How does this come apart?

• What remains when it fails?

• What must responsibly return to raw material?

The future dismantling of the object would shape its initial assembly. Instead of moving in a straight line from production to a landfill, design would operate in loops, where continuation is planned from the very beginning.

Damage as Information, Not Failure

In much of Western consumer culture, damage signals declining value. A scratch lowers the resale price. A cracked screen signals replacement.

But if objects could not be casually discarded, damage would become information instead of failure. A crack would reveal where stress accumulates. Worn edges would show how hands return to the same place. A broken joint wouldn’t justify disposal; it would point to where care or reinforcement is needed.

What Deserves to Exist?

If every object had rights, we would likely make fewer of them. Each one would carry consequence. Mass production wouldn’t disappear, but it would slow. Trends would soften. Launch cycles would lengthen. The pressure to constantly replace would ease under the weight of responsibility.

The driving question of our industry wouldn’t be: What’s next? It would be: What deserves to exist?

And maybe that’s the closing argument. If objects had rights, design wouldn’t become less creative—it would become infinitely more demanding. Every choice would solve real problems. Every sketch would imply a lifespan. Every material choice would suggest a future. Every joint would testify to whether we imagined survival or disposal.

We would still create. But we would create as if the things we make are not silent.

As if they might one day ask us—under oath—why we made them the way we did.