weekly Objet library

Objects that expose their “marks of making”, or artifacts of how they were constructed, are a reminder that everything is made. Nothing simply appears. In a time when most people are wholly detached from making anything they consume, it’s easy to lose sight of that fact. I’m not necessarily lamenting this disconnect, but I appreciate any design which reminds us (whether intentionally or not) that it was made.

The iron cage of consumerism:

• the profit motive stimulates a continual search for newer, better or cheaper products and services

• our own relentless search for social status lock us into an escalating spiral of consumerism

The language of cool is conveyed through a vocabulary of the new.

Confidence in our place in the social world hangs or falls on our ability to participate in consumerism.

We created these conditions [above ☝️].

The restless desire of the consumer is the perfect complement for the restless innovation of the entrepreneur. […] The ‘iron cage of consumerism’ is a system in which no one is free.

I want to argue of course that modern society has internalised a number of specific functions of world maintenance within the dynamics and organisation of consumerism.

The language of stuff:

• This is one of the key lessons from the sociology of consumption. It is now broadly accepted that material things are deeply implicated in the social and psychological fabric of our lives. This role depends heavily on the human tendency to imbue material artefacts with symbolic meaning.

• Mary Douglas (1976, 207):

  “[a]n individual’s main objective in consumption is to help create the social world and to find a credible place in it.”

If consumption plays such a vital role in the construction and maintenance of our social world, then asking people to give up material commodities is asking them to risk a kind of social suicide. People will rightly resist threats to identity. They will resist threats to meaning.

some backstory about the 3 of us [Objet’s founders]. or how 18 moves across 4 continents in the past 15 years made us more intentional with the objects we carry in our lives.

which is exactly my own experience; and why/ how I came to work on Objet:

Early on, I used to be pretty dumb about stuff shocks. I hate moving, and each time I moved, I’d swear that I’d never collect so much crap again. But each time, as I unpacked my life and settled into a new place, stuff would creep back in.  Somewhere along the way — perhaps it was the 5th or 6th move — I got more sophisticated in thinking about my stuff, and started managing the isolation/interdependence tradeoff more carefully.

can’t agree more with that solution:

Instead, I believe you have to think about individual lifestyle elements down to things like knives and shoes. You have to put more thinking into every act of ownership. This thinking doesn’t just add value inside your head. It adds value outside your head, to the stuff itself. Your stuff gets smarter. More information — the output of thinking — gets embodied by it.

nailed down:

It isn’t the quantity of stuff in your life that matters. What matters is how smart the stuff is and whether it is smart in service of your needs.