[ad_1]
A while ago, I saw a tweet from global design consultancy Ideo promoting the sustainability work it was doing for H&M. I’m still obsessed with Ideo’s stories – the halo effect from the years I spent admiring their work. The project in question was a new packaging, which won awards from D&AD and my old employer, Fast company.
On the D&AD website, there was a video of serious-looking young innovators holding sharpies in their hands, surrounded by glass walls decorated with scales of sticky notes. And what did those teams – “from branding, production and logistics, all in design side by side” – come up with? A paper shipping envelope, with a blank label that can be printed with the logos of various H&M brands, such as COS and Weekday. In total, one hundred million were shipped in 2022, thus avoiding 2,000 tons of single-use plastic. Impressive stats to be sure. But also, total bullshit.
I noticed how the video is playing D&AD website I’ve deliberately avoided calling H&M what it is: a fast-fashion giant. To win an award about sustainability, you can’t mention that Zara, H&M, Forever 21, and now new brands like Shein, Boohoo and Fashion Nova, only work if we buy more clothes than we need, simply because the prices are high. Too low to ignore and the patterns change every time we turn around.
The strongly artistic Instagram ads we see are meant to make us ignore that the fashion industry is one of the world’s greatest environmental scourges, accounting for about 10% of carbon emissions and 20% of global wastewater.
The climate crisis probably wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for fast fashion. Today, people in the United States buy a new item of clothing every five days, and we throw away two out of every three items we buy. The amount of what we throw away has doubled in the last 20 years, which you may remember when Zara and Forever 21 started appearing in your local mall. In 2021, outside Accra, the capital of Ghana, a mountain of discarded clothes was emitting so much methane that it exploded, then burned for months.
No amount of paper refills will change that. The lie goes very deep. Designers have been lying to themselves for so long that they don’t even notice it anymore: the lie that “new” means “better” and “newer” means “best.”
Climate change has come to us, driven by a culture that views consumption as the key to happiness and a better life. However, what was once seen as necessary innovation – improving people’s lives through better design, and thus improving the wider economy – has turned into a consumer instinct that drives us to buy more and more, for reasons we can’t always clear. The line between the things we buy because we need them and the things we buy because we have learned to need them has almost disappeared.
We’ve known this since the 1960s, when Ken Garland wrote ““First things first” statement, Calling on designers to rethink their role in fueling consumerism. We heard it again recently in Robin Butters’ book CAPS LOCK (2021), which explains the relationship between capitalism and graphic design. We ignore their ideas at our own peril, and I suspect it’s because we can’t imagine what life could be any other way. But things could be different; In fact, they were.
Designed for consumption
Today’s norms around consumption began in the Great Depression, and designers played a crucial role in creating them. The Great Depression lasted so long, in part because our understanding of macroeconomics was not great. But by the late 1930s, we had realized a basic truth: the economy had always been a game of confidence. It has always been about how people feel – what John Maynard Keynes in 1936 called the “animal instincts” that guide our decisions. If people feel good, they buy things, and this behavior, observed among millions of people, creates greater demand. Greater demand means more jobs and higher wages. Which means being able to heat your home and feed your children.
But in the 1930s, in an era of bank runs and mass homelessness, how do you make people feel good enough that they actually want to go out and buy new things that they don’t feel they can afford? You can imagine how relieved people would have been to hear someone who seemed to have an answer. The answer proposed by many economists and business leaders was simple. They called it “consumption engineering,” which means creating products in a way that makes people feel like they need to have them.
A new breed of design professionals emerged in the 1940s to meet this need. Many of them, such as Raymond Loewy and Walter Durwin Teague, were former advertising creatives who now had the opportunity to invent the things they were trying to sell on behalf of the customers they resented. During an era when few consumer products were “designed” by any kind of professional, a new generation of industrial designers remanufactured almost anything they could make: washing machines that were easier to clean than ever before; Mason jars that were curved so you could shake every last bit of food out of them; Fly swatters with a target on them make killing flies fun.
The modern design profession began with consumption architecture, which was the idea that you could increase demand through ingenuity. In fact, doing so was seen as a moral calling for designers in the 1940s, because the Great Depression taught that generation about the enormous suffering that occurred when demand fell to a low tide. But the architecture of consumption was also the root of the sin that still lies at the heart of our lives today.
People knew about this dynamic in the 1930s, but they thought planned obsolescence was a good thing. Light bulbs and appliances were designed to not last beyond a certain point, so people had to go out and buy more of them, keeping more people working. If that sounds obscene, you’re not looking hard enough. Planned obsolescence still rules our lives. It revitalizes every Instagram ad you get for some creative but insignificant tchotchke; The poor quality of all Shein or Zara clothing that falls apart after a few wears; And the IKEA furniture you buy that ends up on the curb within a year, wearing a sad handwritten note that says: “Free.”
Even if your new iPhone isn’t explicitly designed to break every year, the marketing for this iPhone aims to convince you that your older, serviceable model might be broken, too. Who doesn’t want that extra five megapixels in a camera, or that supercharged chip that makes it so innovative, nothing was cool before? The constant barrage of marketing has us hooked on what’s next, chasing the fleeting peak of a new purchase that fades all too quickly.
Call the designer to action
If any of this sounds like you, please know that none of this is an accusation. This is how I live too, and I hate it. I buy a new phone more than I need, just because. I buy things that end up on the curb much sooner than I promised myself they would. I buy clothes that I end up not wearing. I am the son of baby boomers who believe that consumption makes the world go round. Maybe they destroyed the world. And so did we all. Every new thing you and I buy requires massive amounts of carbon emissions to produce, and accelerates us toward droughts, heatwaves that happen all the time, wildfires that cannot be extinguished, and rising sea levels.
The answer to all this is not to become a bearded hermit who grows his own food in soil fertilized by his dodo. The point is: we don’t know yet what the answer will be, but we don’t have time to wait either.
In June 2022, the UN climate science agency published a call to consider reducing consumer demand, a fundamental premise of degrowth, a new movement based on the clear idea that a planet with limited resources cannot support ever-increasing consumption. This was shocking, because even just two years ago, degrowth had been seen as a fringe idea confined to protest signs at liberal arts schools. This has changed due to the efforts of organizations such as the Sunrise Movement and activists such as Greta Thunberg, who have achieved remarkable success in creating the political will to combat climate change.
“With accelerating climate change and supply chain disruptions offering consumers in the rich world an unusual taste of scarcity, the theory is becoming less taboo and some are beginning to think about what a world of degrowth might look like,” Reuters notes. As for what that might look like, the World Economic Forum believes that declining growth “could mean that people in rich countries change their diet, live in smaller homes, and drive and travel less.” In other words, degrowth means changing our behaviors and expectations. Services such as ride-sharing, and lifestyle choices such as traveling less or living without a car, should become mainstream around the world.
We will not create change on this scale by telling people what to do and hoping for the best. People don’t like to eat broccoli. People especially don’t like being told what they want I cannot Do. For widespread behavioral change to occur, people must desire these changes. This is where design must play a role.
Designers tend to think of design as the process of creating artifacts: posters, apps, chairs, logos, furniture, and gadgets. This is true enough, but it is more than that. Design is the transmission of culture and values. It is the vessel through which we speak to others without words, the way in which we try to make them appreciate a better version of the world through something we create. The emergence of our profession in the 1930s can be our guide. Just as designers of that era saw themselves as inventing a new culture of consumer demand, so designers of the next era need to think of themselves as inventing a new way of living that does not privilege consumption as the sole expression of cultural value. At the very least, we have to start framing consumption differently.
Design is only important if it can influence our ideals about what is desirable, the future we want. As designers, we need to engage our imagination more widely. Instead of imagining how to make a better gadget, we should dream of reframing our willfully ignorant acceptance of consumer culture. But to do this, we must take into account the assumptions embedded in the work we do. Today, how many of us are building a reputation for brands that make disposable items? How many of us are building equity for companies that have never had to pay for the harm they have done to society? I’m thinking of the millions minted by the branding company that was behind BP’s greenwashing, or the millions more minted by the product designers who rethought H&M’s plastic packaging and then proudly touted H&M’s commitment to being environmentally friendly.
Designers need to show us a better way. What would a fashion brand built on the values of repair and reuse look like? Or a consumer electronics brand built on the idea of making your phone last as long as possible? There are economists who believe that reducing growth is a ridiculous idea, and that the only way to ensure social cohesion is to redouble the efforts of late-stage capitalism. But why do we accept that this is the only possible world we can create? Why do we accept that greater consumption is the only path to greater happiness? Consumer culture had to be invented; Designers helped invent it. If that’s the case, we can invent something better. We have no choice. As designers, we don’t have to wait.
This article is an excerpt fromWhat does it mean to be a designer todayWritten by Liz Stinson and Garrett Fuller. Copyright © 2024 by AIGA. Reprinted with permission from PA Press, an imprint of Chronicle Books.
[ad_2]
Source link
