Very thought provoking. As a designer who worked in luxury beauty and spent a lot of time creating packaging for packaging for packaging. And mailing upon mailing upon mailing to promote the tornado of packaging; I was always disheartened by my conundrum.

I wonder if anyone can come up with some good solutions.

-anna
chateausavoie.com

I heard Michael Graves speak at NeoCon and he told a story about designing for Target. They asked him to design the "perfect" ice cream scoop for his line of kitchen gadgets. His scoop was, in his estimation, wonderful but six months later it went on clearance and he had to design another "perfect" scoop. I don't think he likes to design like this but he is still working with Target so I guess he has made peace with it!

Graves also told a great story about Nancy Reagan, Alberto Alessi and a $40,000 tea set...

We have an obsession with "better" that keeps us buying into form over function. If the item works as intended, is it really "better" to replace it with one that is more attractive or adds a few small features? I'd love to get a Keurig coffeemaker, since I work alone at home every day, but I can't justify spending that kind of money when I have a perfectly good 10-cup coffeemaker already on the counter.

Technology gadgets are the worst in this regard - people wait in line for version 4.0 of the same phone! A friend recently purchased his new iPhone - when asked what new features justified waiting in line, he admitted that its just a slightly better version of the old one. And since there's not much one can do with an old phone, they end up in drawers, sold for cents on the dollar, or end up in the trash. Phones didn't use to be disposable, even when they only cost us $20. A total example of form over function.

Ouch!

I am in the middle of a serious renovation project for a kitchen/breakfast room/den.

The garage is full of stuff, stuff, stuff. I have sent one dumpster to the landfill, and now another is filling up.

I am having more stuff delivered today.

A good deal of the stuff was needed, but some were just wanted.

I have a friend who has rental property in Naples Florida.

She outfits it with castoff furniture from the local Goodwill store. Most of the stuff is of recent vintage and previously very expensive. It's sins were that they were last years design must haves.

I think I need a week in the woods by myself.

"A friend recently purchased his new iPhone - when asked what new features justified waiting in line, he admitted that its just a slightly better version of the old one. And since there's not much one can do with an old phone, they end up in drawers, sold for cents on the dollar, or end up in the trash."

I agree with the general presumption here (I was one of those who waited in line for the new iPhone even though the one I had was perfectly functioning) but I should address the point that "there's not much to do with an old phone." That's not really true with respect to the iPhone since it holds its value extremely well. I actually sold my old iPhone for more money than I bought my new iPhone for, so I made a profit from upgrading. I don't know many people who just throw their old iPhones away. People are more likely to throw away gadgets that don't retain as much value, like monitors, laptops, and televisions, even if they are working fine.

Perhaps just nitpicking, but hey. A lot of people upgraded to the new iPhone because it promised better signal reception.

I specialize in affordable design and these cast-offs are the soul of my business. What we must remember when filling our need for new & improved, is the old saying, "One man's trash is another man's treasure." How else do you get this bedroom for $1600 (including designer fees)?
http://interiorsbytm.com/deboer_redesign

I have traveled the world and lived in three countries the last four years... and I see that "design for waste" is a primarily American phenomena. You have a gazillion low-priced options (clothes, home wares, decoration, ect), about 95% are badly made so they will fall apart and one just goes to get another.

In Austria and Italy there is the mentality to save and wait until you can afford the real high-quality thing. There is a very strong second-hand re-use mentality in Austria, even more than in America, because it is based on the "do not waste" mentality instead of "I need to acquire and collect all of these similar things and display them on a shelf." Like Barbara Guggenheim and her light-house and sock-monkey collection come to mind(http://www.completely-coastal.com/2010/04/collecting-decorative-lighthouses-on.html ....really?) This impulse to collect everything of "anything" is uniquely American.

Italy, instead, is surprising in so many ways in this regard. They are ahead of many countries when it comes to design, but there is a very strong superficiality for- designer name brands and tv-charachter products. I just paid 60% less for the exact same push-scooter because it was Batman and not Spiderman - Batman is sooo last year! Forget about Thomas the Tank, that was sooo two years ago! Also, the second-hand market is very small and restricted to very few northern cities or filled exclusively with antiques. Oh, and they are just now bringing door-to-door recycling to my town which is in the province of Rome.. something that has been happening for more than 20 years in San Francisco and Bay Area!

Thank you for such a thought-provoking post. I did not mean to write an essay! I look forward to what others will say.

http://lapsushumanus.blogspot.com/

One good thing that's come about to combat this is the growth of craigslist and ebay. Perhaps it's just a trend, but I'm seeing more people bragging about the great deal they got on a piece from a thrift store or online. Things are "vintage" instead of "old". I know I bought 2 of my main furniture pieces in my apartment from craigslist and furnished an entire apartment for a staging project through craigslist listings.

One note about old phones-you can donate them to be distributed to women's shelters. I've done that with my last 2 phones. For someone who has nothing and desperately needs one my old flip phone is a godsend.

"Design is no longer about lifestyle, but lifecycle..."

That point interested me. I see lifecycles as trends or fashions, and while trends and fashions have always been around, it seems that their lifecycles are getting shorter and shorter. Perhaps Carlson's idea about design being less than 100 years old has something to do with technology. Technology and manufacturing processes that make it possible to create and produce things faster and easier.

But maybe it goes back to the old saying, "Just because you can doesn't mean you should." Just because we can manufacture new designs doesn't mean we should.

However this is a mentality that seems to be the norm in our society and culture. Changing it is going to be difficult.

The craze for MCM and "benchcrafted" stuff is totally symptomatic of this need to "transcend the norm"... just like the mania for antiques in 1890s England (which also suffered from too much manufacture).

I think recycling design by buying used and vintage pieces is a great idea. Unfortunately, I find myself buying so much of it off of ebay and etsy, and I'm sure the packaging and transportation costs probably wipe out any good I've done by the recycling. For some reason, great pieces on Craigslist or in thrift stores are so hard to come by where I live. Sigh.

I moved into a new home 4 months ago, and have yet to put one nail in the walls, or purchase additional furnishings to shore up the 1 bedroom apartment to 3 bedroom home gap.

It's serene, and so refreshing to not be visually assaulted by stuff to look at (and to clean, and to replace).

I'm honestly concerned about accumulating stuff, and I'm actively not doing it, but it's hard.

Ironically, the hypershort lifecycle of a trend (d*s or here to etsy to target in....months now?) is making it easier to refrain.

Using 'we' is unsettling. Speak for yourself, please. Having not read his entire article yet, I do agree with the summary above, in that, I believe function is one of the greatest principles of design. I have always thought this. Multi-purpose/multi-functional pieces have always been more appealing to me; i.e. using a beautiful chest one already owns and slapping a changing pad on top, rather than purchasing a hideous veneered changing table/cabinet thing from a baby store. Going out and buying something with low to no value just to fill a void is harmful to your wallet and the planet.
The HGTV show 'Design Remix' is a great concept; it encourages people to shop around their home for items to decorate a space.
Technology could be to blame for some people losing their creativity, and creativity is definitely necessary for using a more sustainable thought process.
Also, gift registries aren't helping matters. Why does one young couple need a $1K set of new china? ...

... and I agree with clampers...
There should be harsher regulations placed on manufacturers.

The problem tho is that our economy is based on mass-consumption:
Stores can't generate sales when folks are holding onto things they bought last year.
Shippers can't employ people when nobody is shipping goods.
Factories can't employ people to make things when their products aren't being bought.
Designers would have no work if there's nothing left to design.
Wood Cutters, Farmers, Miners and Petroleum Corporations can't earn money when nobody is buying the raw materials to make stuff with.

Now the concept that every year, everyone should have more sales and therefore more profits is absolutely unsustainable - There is always a peak, then a downward slope...
...however there's also got to be a way to keep last year's goods from going straight into landfill, and to lower our dependence on raw materials & manufactured goods that destroy the earth and enrich those people who would plot our demise.

...sorry, keep thinking of things...
Also, the financing available to EVERYONE the past few years (not so much at this moment, but between 2004-last year?) made people feel like they had bumped up a Class level in society. They went out and bought all new furniture and toys for their homes, cause they could finance it with 0 money down. New homes, new cars, junk, were bought, and now many of them are worse-off, which affects everyone. I've never pretended to be anything more than lower middle class.
A great-society-size ego-check may be necessary to jump-start this rethinking design 'movement.'

I feel so refreshed to see this here on AT. I have often thought the same thing, and unless it's absolutely necessary to buy the new thing (which I save for and buy as high-quality as possible), I buy used off Craigslist or from a thrift store.

The thing that depresses me most about manufactured design is that it stifles the creative, kludge-happy nature of human beings. We evolved to tinker and fix and make. When handed something that almost works, we make it work amazingly. To me, the homes that are full of fixes and "a-ha!" innovations are the most interesting, and bland bought decor (even pieces by the most creative designers) are sad.

"We evolved to tinker and fix and make. When handed something that almost works, we make it work amazingly."

Well, some of us have.

You'd be amazed the number of people out there who might have a broken hinge on a kitchen cabinet and will live with it that way & complain for years that they need an all-new kitchen rather than simply going to the hardware store and investing in a $2.25 replacement hinge and a couple minutes of their time to fix the problem.

I think the issue is that manufacturers are used to a very unsustainable level of production, which forces designers to constantly be pushing ideas that aren't well thought out and will become obsolete. Our society is based on the "Happy Meal" mentality - buy something cheaply and replace it with something else cheap when you get tired of it/it breaks. Consumers are used to the advertising and used to thinking that they constantly need to be buying stuff to keep up with trends instead of developing personal style or sticking with classics. Consumers are so used to cheap imports from China/Mexico and other countries where sweat shop labor is employed that we think things are overpriced when they are locally made because the people making them actually had to be paid a semi-livable wage. All of this is destructive to the environment as well as to human rights.

What's the solution? I think it is up to consumers to readjust their priorities. Buying used is more viable than ever. Even if you want items produced by big box stores, you can usually find the same thing on craigslist for half the price. Buying handmade and locally made goods is very important, and realizing that the extra cost of these means you are supporting fair labor costs. Buy fair trade when you buy imports. Shop at farmer's markets, crafts fairs, and small local businesses instead of chain stores. Local businesses often are slightly more expensive because they can't order in bulk the way bigger stores do, but you are supporting better business practices.

I also think it's very important simply to rethink what you need and what is worth buying/owning. Buying plastic chairs from ikea that are going to sit in a landfill simply doesn't make sense when you can buy something made of real materials for less money. And avoid sending things to the landfill as well. Even broken electronics can be recycled (some centers even offer cash) and old phones can be given to charities -- for example, in third world countries, reselling a donated iphone could keep a family well fed or cover medical costs.

"A lot of people upgraded to the new iPhone because it promised better signal reception."

That's exactly my point - people buy things for the form and not the function. People HAD to have an iPhone, only to discover that it didn't make for a very good phone (or despite knowing that AT&T's service wasn't good in their area). So as soon as something slightly better came along, people jumped for it. That's one more gadget being produced, along with all of its packaging. Don't get me wrong - I'd love to have an iPhone, but it simply doesn't make any sense to get rid of my perfectly good phone just for some cool features. Nevermind buying a near exact replica of something I already have before the old one wears out.

Does anyone else find it pretty ridiculous to think that a new "next generation" iPhone is developed every year?

Don't forget freecycle (begun in my hometown) for those things you can't sell but don't need to fill up a landfill with. Or just a donation to Goodwill/salvation army, etc.

I think form-follows-function went out the window in the last 50 odd years. Sure there are companies who practice the philosophy, but in essence, it's not good for business to encourage consumes to value function over form. And lets be honest, the newest blender that has five new settings is not a function feature. It's a form feature. It's a "look-how-many-different-sized-granules-I-can-chop-ice-into" bragging rights form feature.

We are encouraged to believe every small feature change is a matter of function, when really, it is a form of novelty.

Finally we are beginning to take a critical look at our habits, and I think workmanship and function are going to be climbing their way up the priority list. Hopefully, heirloom pieces will begin to be valued again, because I certainly know that the side tables I picked up from my grandmother, who bought them 40 years ago, are in better condition than the Ikea Billy bookshelves I bought 4 years ago.

There's a reason why recycle is the last word in reduce-reuse-recycle: it's the least efficient. In spread-out cities like Los Angeles, recycling plastics is worse for the environment because recycling trucks have to drive farther and use more gas to collect a trucksworth of recyclables, not even counting in the energy required to process the plastic.
Save the planet? Stop buying so much stuff. My partner's mother has no less than 10 reusable canvas bags, all of which she's used exactly once. At least her efforts are well-intentioned, because there are people who consume and throw away far more because they don't care.

Some have said "design will save the world". No it won't. Design is just a tool, and its how we use it that matters. Design for the sake of aesthetics begets more design. Designing a product which betters peoples lives or is more ecologically friendly is design used towards a good end.
Does this mean we should reject aesthetics and live drab but efficient lives? No, because aesthetics improve quality of life, which is important. Aesthetics just need to be presented in a more sensible manner.
What happens with the internet is hype. There are pieces and micro-trends which blossom and burst quickly, fueled by intense discussion and interest, all of which fades when the next new thing comes along. What needs to happen is to slow things down. To focus on designing in a way that minimizes buying new things, and instead focuses on how to use what you already have in new ways. Focusing on things which will last you decades.

There's actually collectors of Happy Meal toys (have you seen the Incredibles collection? Awesome!) Ancient Roman and Greek toddlers played with toys made from baked clay which broke pretty easily, and we can see the few bits that survived in museums. Will future citizens of Earth see Happy Meal toys in museums? Probably.

Centuries ago, the potteries of Great Britain worked 24 hours a day to keep up with the demand for containers, dinner sets, teapots, etc. Today, we prize those mass-produced items because they were so fragile, not very many survived. Was their very fragility planned obsolescence? Before the Industrial Revolution, the peasant classes couldn't afford to eat off dinner plates made of anything but wood. (Not unlike Henry Ford and his employees who could afford to buy the very cars they made on the assembly lines he invented.)

Leaving the world a better place has little do with consumer goods and everything to do with medicine, food, and communications technology.

I was kind of proud of myself when I went shopping for a new sewing machine and was asked what I was using it for so the merchant could recommend one. Once I verbalized what I use it for, it occurred to me that I should just have my old one refurbished for about $75.

Buying a new sewing machine? $700.
Knowing the difference between need and want? Priceless

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, it's a great read. Yes, a material culture based upon built in obsolescence is great for the economy, but overall it reduces our quality of life on so many levels.

the companies that sell the vast majority of these low-quality products are legally bound by their corporate charters to maximize profit for their shareholders. good design is not the goal. they co-opt good designers, who, like the ice cream scoop guy, soon realize that they are not working towards good design but good sales. consumers can take a stand, but corporations must be held accountable for the true cost of their products throughout their short lifecycle. we need a return to quality..... a la Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

So, companies who employee people and have shareholders should just shut down because everything's been invented and made already? Tell me AT bloggers use dialup and Compaq and AOL.

Oh, and do you all think Maxwell's not interested in profit? Get real.

How will we "transcend the norm and leave the world a better place than we found it"?

Better design of course.