Week 8 Reflection

Weak Signals and Challenges for consumerist vs. minimalist future designs

This week was mostly about designing futures for a consumerist / minimalist future. Over the span of two classes we deeply investigated the pros and cons of both world views and brainstormed products that could live in and cooperate with those views. I truly believe that our current world is being devoured by consumerism, and making the idea of going minimalist less and less mainstream. I thing I thought about was how minimalism was “the thing” before 20th century. People just lived and consumed things they would survive with and never had a chance to obtain more. So at that age minimalism was the norm and only the richest had an abundance of belongings and a chance to enjoy consumerism. They would send troops and try to capture the land that had the new thing and kept on consuming themselves with their urge to obtain more. Now that I think about it, we have come a long way without requiring consumerism to be a part of us. But now that the world runs of abundance of production and market, we will keep on having a large group of the population fixated on consumerism.

I think everything I said is for the current world situation. I also took some time and thought about minimalism as the mainstream economic view of the population in the 21st century. It’s hard to imagine a need for violence when people are not after other people’s belongings. (that is on a political & personal level) The thing we talked most about in class would be the hardship of designing for such a population. I think it would be the greatest test as the balance between form & function would have to shift heavily onto function. A potential buyer would be focusing on the function as that is the main reason they would be shopping. But if the prospective product has a larger emphasis on form rather than its function, since the buyer has a tunnel vision with the end of the tunnel fixated on a certain level of functionality, there will be less of a chance to sell a form based product.

I think the problems we discussed in class mostly involved such difficulties and deciding on what solution would better. Also, I really enjoyed the first several minutes of “What Would Jesus Buy?” as it was titled with the problem we were asking to ourselves.

I think that the current project for the Communication Design class involves a much different topic. We are not designing a product but more so an artifact that is a storytelling tool that is aimed to let people interpret Katrina and the after effects of it on Lower 9th and 10th Districts in New Orleans in a different way. However, I think the approach I will be taking will change the set of characters that are involved in the storytelling, and this change will include making them really bound to consumerism and the latest trends of today. I think the class discussions we had in class about consumerism will help me with setting up the characters.

As for my design studies, thinking about weak signals and making sure I make the correct interpretations about them will help me understand a problem in any given time better. Maybe the product I will be designing will be a weak signal, and therefore I need to make sure the interpretation people receive is what I wanted to deliver.