Design Activism is about so much more than designing with sustainability in mind; it “can be considered something that can be an outcome of practice or explorations in real-life situations and/or academia” (85). Design Activism includes changing the way you work, produce, and live. We, as designers, must look deeper in; “Understanding what motivates us to consume differently seems to be important” (113) because this will tell us why we are consuming like we are and how we can work to change it.
When thinking about the “in” fads today, my first thought was the website Pinterest. I thought about why people are so in to Pinterest, and I realized – it is because we, as consumers love the satisfaction of doing something ourselves. We also love uniqueness; I think we enjoy unique items so much because we like fitting in and standing out at the same time; we like fashionable, “in-style” products but we like to put our own spin on it. Fuad-Luke describes this effortlessly stating, “Demands for products that are more easily personalized or customizable, tend to offer the promise of more durable emotional relationships. The inextricable rise of the internet in everyday life is leading to much experimentation in ways of making and the emergence of co-created, co-designed and replicable designs is a plausible reality” (95). With the originality-lovers target market in mind - I have put together an idea I think will catch on. My idea is to have a furniture store that offers reupholster classes and tools and fabrics that would assist in this. I think people will like this because they can buy their furniture new and have the resources to change the fabrics, finishes, etc. on them so they never get old! Consumers like the feeling of originality in their own homes and being able to say “I made that!” to their friends and family members. This idea targets mainly the over-consumer – or the people that love to buy. My idea for the under-consumers – those who live off of nearly $2 per day – is to have a Return-Some-Love program. This program would allow consumers to bring in furniture they no longer want, nor want to renew and offer them a generous coupon. The returned items would be renewed and cleaned up and donated to a family in need. I see so many old desks, mattresses, and other furniture in and around dumpsters and no one wants them because they do not know where they have been; but a lot of the under-consumers need them.
In conclusion, we, as over-consumers have the responsibility to use our unwanted products for the better and keep our under-consumer friends in mind. “Ezio Manzini has long declared that sustainability is a societal journey, brought about by acquiring new awareness and perceptions, by generating new solutions, activating new behavioral patterns and, hence cultural change”. Therefore, in order to promote my furniture store I would go to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. and tell about the store and what the store proposes to change about our culture. Doing this, I would be communicating our brand and the need for behavioral change in consumers.
