Consume your ethics

Ethical “Design has become a value added extra, a magical component that can be sprinkled like fairy dust onto a project to align it with the right market segment…”1 Jonathan Bell

A large amount of ethical design finds kitsch, fun and quirky re-uses of redundant products. While it’s a commendable effort it by-passes the issue at hand, we consume too much rubbish. “Objects have been reduced to transient objects that reflect fads and fashions rather than actual needs and demands.”2 Need is a word that seems only to have proper use in discussion of the developing world as we seem to have lost an understanding of what we need and can’t separate it from what we want; we are lead by desire. As we need for nothing when put in stark contrast of children with swollen bellies, it is our desire not our needs which shape the consumer market. The gratification of these desires require continual production of things for consumption, consumption has no need except for this gratification.

In gratifying the desires of the mass the wider repercussions of producing these consumables is ignored and pushed away as they are comfortable to face. K. G. Pontus Hultén said “The production of articles that nobody really needs, but which occupy the ground floors of all big stores, is one of the many outward symptoms of something basically wrong in a world of overproduction and undernourishment.”3 Saying no to Fair Trade is saying yes to slavery, yes to poverty and yes to exploitation. People don’t like guilt trips but reality will always be reality. Ethical design needs to concern itself with a rebellion against superficial consumption.

Reference: 1 Jonathan Bell, ‘Ruins, Recycling, Smart Buildings, and the Endlessly Transformable Environment,’ in
strangely Familiar : Design and Everyday Life (2004)
2 Jonathan Bell, ‘Ruins, Recycling, Smart Buildings, and the Endlessly Transformable Environment,’ in
strangely Familiar : Design and Everyday Life (2004)
3 Victor Papanek, ‘Design For the Real World, Human Ecology and Social Change,’ (1984)

(image from http://dailypoetics.typepad.com/daily_poetics/found/index.html)