Newmark explained to Jarvis, “If you make a great platform that people really want to use, then the worst thing you could do is to put yourself in the middle, getting in the way of what people want to do with it.”

Caroline Woolard and four other artists from Brooklyn recognized that sometimes a physical space is needed for people to feel comfortable to start a barter network. In January 2010 the group turned a 350-square-foot former barbershop on Norfolk Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan into Trade School. The narrow space has a long chalkboard on

we also spend inordinate amounts of energy and money storing excess stuff rather than asking the hard truths of why we have so much in the first place.

Annie Leonard explains in her book The Story of Stuff, “Guess what percentage of total material flow through this system is still in product or use 6 months after their sale in North America. Fifty percent? Twenty? NO. One percent. One! In other words . . . 99 percent of the stuff we run through this system is trashed within 6 months.”29 And the

The fourth ingredient in Manzini’s design thinking is “enhanced communications support.” Part of the power of Collaborative Consumption is that we possess many of the resources—from actual goods to human talent—to meet our needs. We just need to find ways to coordinate and derive value from them.

Services such as Zipcar, Bag Borrow and Steal, SolarCity, and DenimTherapy are not reinventing their industry’s product but reimagining the larger system within which their product operates.

bottom-up community ecosystem that founder Pierre Omidyar calls an “of the people, by the people, for the people” environment.25

(Freecardboardboxes.com)

Sociologist Robert K. Merton identified five sources of unintended consequences: ignorance, error, immediate interest, basic values, and self-defeating prophecy. Two of these sources are particularly relevant to hyper-consumption: first, ignorance (it’s impossible to anticipate everything); and second, the imperious immediacy of interest.