People and Objects
Our Relationship With the Stuff We Make and Consume is Changing with Many Implications for Business and Society.
We are biologically drawn to the objects (physical and digital) that we make and consume. The good news is that science is starting to offer better insight on how the rules of attraction between people and objects work. As we know more, we start to also realize the many implications that these shifting values have and the responsibility of designers, marketers and entrepreneurs in taking advantage of these changes for the better.
As Lace Hosey points out in his New York Times piece on the science of design, “if every designer understood more about the mathematics of attraction, the mechanics of affection, all design ― from houses to cellphones to offices and cars ― could both look good and be good for you.”
I’m particularly interested in the “good for you” part and how understanding our changing relationship with objects (what attracted us to them in the past versus today and tomorrow) can help us improve what we create as well as how we create and consume it.
Internet entrepreneur Graham Hill wrote earlier this year an article on the subject of consumption challenging our seemingly endless appetite for stuff. After reading it it’s easy to be both fearful and hopeful about a world where homes and storage space grows as family size shrinks, where we lost connection with the things we buy and consume.
The signs of our changing relationship are still inconsistent and not always visible but they exist and designers in many fields are paying attention.
The relatively new field of critical design offers another lens to view our evolving love-hate relationship with objects. Design firms like Dunne & Raby create objects meant “to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions about the role products play in everyday life.” In other words, objects that solely exist for the purposes of communication, protest, provocation.
It feels right that we look up to design as a means of provocation. After all, we are all fluent in the language of objects. MoMA’s senior curator Paola Antonelli puts it brilliantly: The value of critical design exists in part in how it helps us reflect on “the consequences of our present choices in the future.”
We simply can’t continue to make and market stuff without thoughtful consideration of how it might alter the world around us. From privacy to environmental impact, present and future have never been so close.
Perhaps another sign of the evolving relationship between people and objects is the small but growing market of things that are made with a broader awareness of where they come from, what it takes to make them, and equally as important, where they go.
Consider Autodesk’s Sarah Krasley’s five shifts in how today’s culture will impact tomorrow’s product design. In her FastCompany piece, Krasley quotes Jamie Gray from design shop Matter, who leaves us with a vision where cutting edge tech and old practices crash to produce something new:
“Locally sourced, locally made, locally purchased; we’ll have greater transparency into who made the product and what it was made from. I also think the products will become increasingly smarter. The designs we see on display will undoubtedly be part of the internet of things and will help us have a more personal experience with the products we buy, versus the design for the masses.”
In addition to local, smart, personal and connected objects made to fit a specific value cycle, other shifts like collaborative consumption are already showing signs of much deeper changes in our relationship with the stuff we buy.
Think about cars, the ultimate object. Very recently car bosses touted how cars are more than objects, closer to second homes or pets, yet car sharing continues to thrive and dozens of brands continue to enter the market. Does this mean that we care less about cars as emotional things? That we care less about the car as an object?
Not an easy question. Particularly because car sharing experiences like zipcar are made of a system of objects that range from a smartphone app to a member’s keycard. We could argue that this system balances the personal (app, name of the car, member’s card, profile, etc.) with the communal and that the feelings we used to associate with one object are being distributed across the system.
From origin to “intelligence” (i.e. “the internet of things”), we are today actively reevaluating our relationship with the things we create and consume in ways that challenge design, business, marketing, advertising, ownership, and so many other concepts, disciplines and actors that just a few years ago seemed immovable and forever tied to the world as we know it. I find this incredibly exciting.
