active consumerism

With bombarding consumer experiences such as Fry’s Electronics and EBay, we are constantly being pulled in endless purchasing directions. The choices seem infinite, but they are not. They are preselected experiences promising to add to a lifestyle that is entirely made up of fantasy where kids are “cool”, Boomers are young again and everyone is surrounded by stuff. This “stuff” firmly establishes a new design profession employing a large group of an ever-growing world population where the profession itself is growing at a rapid rate. I walk down the halls of Art Center College of Design past the work oozing off the walls, collages of scribbles splashed in the interiors of each classroom, and the best-of-the-best sparkling in the gallery. Each piece, with its perfected lines, color palette and composition, competing to penetrate our over-saturated consumer-oriented culture while hoping to succeed in the exponentially growing spectacle.

How does the future of design stop the momentum of this phenomenon? “Just like philosophy the moment it achieved its full independence, every discipline, once it becomes autonomous, is bound to collapse - in the first place as an attempt to offer a coherent account of the social totality, and eventually even as a partial methodology viable within its own domain.” (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 131) To approach a solution for our “spectacular” cultural phenomenon we must redefine the process of consumerism altogether before we run out of natural resources and the entire system collapses. Instead of branding “cool”, creating products that destroy the natural environment for personal monetary gain and advocating unhealthy consumerism, designers can focus their efforts toward developing systems that allow consumers to actively make their own decisions. These systems empower passive consumers into active ones. They protect the quality of life from becoming the character in Pride’s Paranoia’s “Futureshock” and provide the choice of what to consume rather than forcing upon us products that already exist or that have no real value other than making money. Unless we address this, “we humans may well be on [the] way to our own extinction.” (Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam, p. 88) Until then, I continue to walk through the bowels of the spectacular machine.