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The product milieu refers to the aggregate of objects, activities, services and environments that support the product’s usability, identity and value.

The product milieu attempts to shed light on the design activity that brings objects into being and the actions which those objects enable or inhibit. First proposed by Design History professor, Victor Margolin, in his publication, Discovering Design, co-edited by Richard Buchanan, the product milieu is applicable in the fields of social theory, economic theory, political theory and design theory.

History
Margolin traces the history of defining the product milieu to the French sociologist, Abraham Moles, who acknowledged relations between people, actions and objects, as part of Moles’s larger theory of action. Margolin adds to Abraham by drawing attention to the way that the product connects to action, that of a dynamic process.

Construction
The ‘product’ in question, for Margolin, is the “human-made material and material objects, activities, and services, and complex systems of environments that constitute the domain of the artificial”.

The product milieu is divided into the following parts:
 * 1) Civic and state projects
 * 2) The Market
 * 3) Independent Design
 * 4) * Cost
 * 5) * Satisfaction
 * 6) * Empowerment
 * 7) * Self-reliance
 * 8) * Self-actualization
 * 9) * To satisfy a social need