We have too much cool stuff. In fact, we have so much that, as the late George Carlin noted, “if we didn’t have so much stuff we wouldn’t need a house, ’cause that’s all a house really is: a place to put our stuff.”
The blame for ravening, omnivorous consumerism and the ties that have bound it to the once-American and now-Global Dream can be laid before various entities: Madison Avenue, Capitalism, and the ever-popular Joneses, of Next Door, Anytown, USA. But what is it that drives us to purchase that tenth iteration of a potato peeler when our kitchen drawers are already crammed full of perfectly functional (if a tad blunt, or dinged) peelers, graters, and, god help us, sharkily serrated grapefruit spoons? Seriously: Enough stuff, already.
Enter director Gary Hustwit (Helvetica) whose revelatory documentary *Objectified* shines a much needed light on the intersection of design and desire in the modern world. “I know that over that over the course the 18 months spent making the film my attitudes towards consuming have changed. I’ve become more of a considered kind of consumerist; I still like to buy things and I’m not going to stop buying new things, but I am going to think a lot harder about why I want it and why I need it and do I need it?”
At a time when environmentally unfriendly disposable technologies (cell phones, laptop batteries) are rapidly depleting the amount of land set aside for their burial, proactive consumerism — thinking before you buy (or design) stuff and thinking hard — is not only sensible, it’s green.
“As sources of manufacturing and the industrial piece of our economy, in Europe and in America, have kind of moved to Asia,” notes IDEO CEO Tim Brown, “more and more companies have started to focus on things that create value in different ways than only through making stuff. The value of brands and the value of experiences that get delivered through services create a huge amount of the economic wealth that we have in our Western economies today.
“We work on projects where very little of it is a new piece of stuff. We did a project last year where the Department of Energy came along and asked us ‘How do you make energy conservation sexy in America? How do we make it not about being good [because] the only ones interested in it are the ones that live in Northern California?’ And we used all the same techniques [to answer that question] as we would if we were designing a new potato peeler or a new chair but we applied them to figuring out the kinds of services and different kinds of products that might be helpful in terms of reducing our use of energy.
“When I hire designers out of design school…and ask them what they most want to work on, it’s these new kinds of problems, to be really honest with you, not another printer, not another laptop, not another cell phone.”
The dawning of the age of stufflessness? Hardly. The dawning of a new era of sustainable stuff, sexily, objectively so? Now that’s more like it.
This article appears in March 13 • 2009.