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Continuing to design within the ‘product-machine’ will only continue to destroy the environment beyond repair. This is a call for designers to finally grow beyond products and into the real heroes the planet needs.
In this article, I explore what it means to be a designer in a critically changing world. We have historically been subservient to investor interests, even if it means harming our, and our loved ones’ environment. Critically, we are at a point of inflection where designers’ growing desires to leave the world better off than they found it is coinciding with the increasing precariousness of consumption/debt-based capitalism. A shift is happening away from products — so what does it mean to design in a postproduct world?
The shifting contextual enablers of the designer
Today, the term ‘product’ is commonly thought of as a discreet package of value (as that concept is useful for us), however the not-so-creative term in fact came about as a means to define the things that went through a mass production process. Before the Industrial Revolution, we had tools and artefacts, but we didn’t have products. According to The Online Etymology Dictionary, the use of the term ‘Product’ in the sense of “what is produced commercially for sale”, only began being used by the 1890’s. Here the term is specifically referred to in a financial economic sense and commonly thought of (even to this day) as having very little to do with design. That’s because products are a conceptual part of capitalism and mass consumerism, not as we product designers tend to conflate it with, design. Previous to the Industrial Revolution, the term was used more to indicate the result of something — like the “mathematical quantity obtained by multiplication.”
The Industrial Revolution however changed the way we as people related to our tools and artefacts forever. All of a sudden, these items went from being bespoke, crafted items, to being standardised and homogenous outputs of a…
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