Material Innovations

I am a Hindu woman living in the state of Assam, India and would like offer suggestions based on my life experience to reduce the consumption rate of mass produced goods in the United States.  Although my country is becoming an important global economy and modern ways are affecting our life style, I am aspiring to live primarily by hundreds of years of tradition, ritual, and cultural heritage.  Our lives are enriched by less stuff, less work, less stress, less debt and, thus, enriched by a life of more time, satisfaction, more balance and security.  You Tube:  The Quest for Eternal Bliss (from The Happiness Project) was filmed in India.

The concept of reducing material things in one’s life, espoused by Bruce Sterling, makes good sense and I try to live this way in India.  He suggests living with only beautiful things; things with sentimental value and meaning; important tools, such as appliances to assist with living; and get rid of everything else.  This is a good place to begin and you can become your authentic selves without unnecessary possessions.

With scarcity looming, Americans need to JUST SAY NO to random purchasing of goods and buy only what you really need.  Write down every single purchase for three months and study your purchasing patterns.  Become part of the JUST SAY NO movement, influencing a paradigm shift, ultimately altering policy changes in government and corporate behavior.  A materialistic lifestyle is a depth-less world of mass produced goods.  JUST SAY NO to unnecessary goods and live a sustainable lifestyle by reducing consumption and waste.

A Steady-State Economy is one of zero population growth and consumption within the limits of that which can be regenerated and assimilated by the environment.  Pollution and resource depletion are driven by consumption.  http://www.steadystate.org.

Look at what others are saying about consumption:   Harvard Business Review http://blogs.hbr.org/es/2010/02/more_for_less_for_more_how_to.html. This discusses more value for less cost for more people.  You Tube: “The Most Important Video You Will Ever See” is Herman E. Daly educating about the growth factor and its exponential effect.

Dance, fairs, festivals, arts and crafts, agriculture and cuisine are some of the traditions and rituals we experience as a community in Assam.   Being engaged with these practices with my family and friends leads to a satisfying life.

***note. this is completely fictional.

It is seems redundant to say that in the USA mass produced goods are everywhere. It is a mass produced culture.

I recently left my home in Coimbatore, India for a brief trip to a souther part of North Carolina, where EVERYTHING, including the communities is mass produced.

And so, I come with at least one solution to this brutally habit. Throwing a sticker or label on something will not stop someone from buying it. This is evident with cigarette consumption, where money drives the pay of the label makers, and big bank corporations control the labeling, and branding of their product. So outsider labels are not affective because there is a gross convenience to large scale consumption that a small, practically un readable label does not expel.

My solution is a simple one of downsizing, starting with advertisement standards. In India, things are crowded, and fast. In the USA, things are fast, but vast. I propose that North Americans make billboards (a popular widespread form of advertisement) that are a smaller, simpler, and geared towards handmade or heirloom products. They could portray the maker with the product, or the processes and story that go into each product. They could decompose, or react with the environment or its potential user groups. This uncommon format will allude to diversity and an idiosyncratic individualism in the represented product that Americans crave. Billboards can shift the standards of mass advertisement and perhaps, overtime, this philosophy could trickle down into the greater purchasing patters of the US culture.

After viewing the Design for the First World competition guidelines I am immediately struck by the relevancy of their concerns for sustainability and over-consumption to the concerns that we address in our own program. To put myself in the shoes of the qualifying designers, I would look at this as an examination of my own and my fellow first worlder’s use and exploitation of developing economies to be their production work horses. Connected to one of my earlier posts, I feel that the U.S. (to use my locale) has over the past 50 years developed a relationship with China, specifically on having them produce (as we are all well aware) astonishing quantities of products and goods for our always growing practices of consumerism and consumption of goods.

Yeah, so, we all get that. WE USE TOO MUCH SHIT. But what do we do about it?

Well, this week has been a surprising series of revelations and connections made for myself, after conceiving my own thesis statement to revolve around some of these exact issues. Not so much addressing that we use too much, but that we as makers are losing our own connection to the things we own and in turn make for others. We’re on a poor cycle of designing and making our goods based on the examples set by a larger industry, and are catering to an audience that is craving and demanding objects in the manner that their consumption habits have shaped them into craving. We need to step back for a minute and take a breath. A stunning outline of how to do this came in the form of our class based video by Bruce Sterling and his addressing of our objects and services and their structure in our lives. Sterling’s view is essentially a call to purge. Which as much as I feel is possibly the only solution to reset, is not the only answer. Looking at the site http://www.kk.org/streetuse/, we see stunning examples of ingenuity and practicality in design making, even though the end results are less than beautiful as an aesthetic value, there is something about their simplicity and intuitive nature that presents beauty to us in a new way. Objects can be fun, and superfluous, but we’ve got to make them count as well.

My thoughts stemming from these sources and my (as of this week brand new) thinking about the products in our lives leads me to my design for the first world proposal. I propose that you make your own stuff. Plain and simple. Before you buy it, you try and make it. If you REALLY can’t succeed in making something to fill the functional role of what you were about to buy, then go ahead and buy a nice one. But give making a try. Let me make it for you. Let my fellow makers make it for you. Give up on the box store, and examine the skills of your community and fellow non-factory working human beings to be downright ingenious about how to solve your product problems. Also, don’t throw away every damn thing that breaks (here is where I begin to disagree with Mr. Sterling). I feel that this would result in a much greater appreciation of our stuff, and our natural relationship to it. By increasing these connections and raising this awareness, I feel that the trend towards reducing consumptive habits will begin to change, at least on a small scale.