Beyond Consumption
We are seeing a movement from a world of factory-over-production and consumption to a market dominated by limited local production and manufacturing. The veil is being pulled back to reveal that, keeping up with the Jones’ is not a genetic predisposition, it’s an invented need and an endless and unfulfilling need at that. The power of consumption as the aide for social approval is quickly being seen as anecdote for vanity and therefore antithetic to human connection and social intimacy.
Goods made in earnest by craftsmen and skilled tradespeople are making a huge come back. So what does this mean for the overseas manufacturing sector and what kind of new world will rise from these carbon spewing ashes?
Here’s a shortlist of a few:
Maker shops — Custom and preprogrammed designs ordered from your house made around the corner, picked up in less than a day on your drive home from work. After they’ve served their purpose they will be returned for repurposing into new products. A brilliant move to closed-loop cycling and circular economies.
Everyone Makes — the advent of 3D freeware leads to nearly every household having makers in them. Moms can order the latest designer bowls and kitchenware after scrolling though the open-source design catalog online. Dad can pick up his new iPad case he designed using 4 types of impact-absorbing waterproof materials to fit his active lifestyle.
Ergonomic mastery- The challenge with universal sizing charts for clothing is no more. We move to custom tailored apparel for your body in an hour, to realms of furniture, dimensionally smart, and built for your specific lifestyle nuances.
Auto-ordering- Companies just send you new product when you’ve run out due to the smart IoT embedded into nearly every product. No more time sucks shopping.
Buy-backs — Companies take responsibility for what they’ve produced and sold and will take back broken and used products with incentives like coupons and percentages off the new models.
Prefab and Patterned — Prefab homes have been around for a while, but we will see homes can be ordered with the owner using specific guidelines like pricepoint levels of finishes, square footage, and assumed geographic location for automated orientation suggestions, glazing and R-value generation. It will also use your personal gps tracking data from you phone to guess at different interior layout patterns that match you lifestlyle patterns. On top of this they will all be totally off-grid and net-positive in energy generation. Square footages will continue to decline as Millenials move into the independent housing phase.
Grocery goes local — Industrial farming has worked for a hundred years or so, but the added costs for shipping and labor is becoming seen as an wasteful and costly variable. Industrial aquaponics is fast becoming the producing giant of organic food and its year-round! No more country to country shipping…well, at least much less.
Drivers License? Who needs. — While it is still a mandate to have a government ID, the idea of needing to actually drive will become obsolete. They will do away with the need for a driving test with the ID process…and they won’t even issue you a hard copy card. It’ll be in the cloud and tagged to you, your phone, and your smart wearables.
In-Home Boutique Eatery — packaged ingredients and meals will be directly shipped to your door encoded with settings that talk to your IoT appliances to make for easy preparation, and cooking for precise cuisine.
Energy Sharing — No longer will energy companies monopolize the grid of utility services. Energy production will be a synchronized dance between neighbors with solar PV, solar heat, and wind generation. This will effectively lower billing rates and generate a ubiquitous awareness of energy use within society.
This and many other components will soon give rise. I’m excited to be a designer I such an era of paradigm shifts and happy it’s closer than ever to becoming reality.
