Somebody Else’s Problem

Consumerism, Sustainability and Design

Robert Crocker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783534913
• eBook ISBN: 9781351284103
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

Gold winner of the AXIOM Business Book Award in the category of Philanthropy, Non-Profit, Sustainability. Please see: http://www.axiomawards.com/77/award-winners/2017-winners

Consumerism promises a shortcut to a 'better' life through the accumulation of certain fashionable goods and experiences. Over recent decades, this has resulted in a rising tide of cheap, short-lived goods produced, used and discarded in increasingly rapid cycles, along the way depleting resources and degrading environmental systems.Somebody Else's Problem calls for a radical change in how we think about our material world, and how we design, make and use the products and services we need. Rejecting the idea that individuals alone are responsible for the environmental problems we face, it challenges us to look again at the systems, norms and values we take for granted in daily life, and their cumulative role in our environmental crisis.Robert Crocker presents an overview of the main forces giving rise to modern consumerism, looks closely at today's accelerating consumption patterns and asks why older, more 'custodial' patterns of consumption are in decline. Avoiding simplistic quick-fix formulas, the book explores recommendations for new ways of designing, making and using goods and services that can reduce our excess consumption, but still contribute to a good and meaningful life.

Part I
From consumption to consumerism

1
Pleasure and luxury in consumption

Pleasure in consumption

Small children are great pleasure seekers. Toys, games, little outings with their parents in the park, eating and drinking, and perhaps, more meditatively, exploring Mummy’s cupboards or Daddy’s shoes, all these activities are pursued with an innocent hedonism that is, by turn, both delightful and frustrating to their parents. And what brings pleasure can change very rapidly: one moment it might be an ice cream and its sweet, creamy, coldness in the mouth, and next the delight of riding a tricycle in the house, or bouncing on the bed.

Young children also experience great joy and pride in using and possessing things they label as ‘mine’, particularly clothing and toys, from a pair of shiny red shoes, or a warm woollen coat with fascinating buttons, to a little red truck pulled clattering around the living room floor. Some of these things, particularly small toys, dolls and pets, are magically transformed into ‘friends’, to be talked or sung to and played with.Many children’s stories offer an insight into this process of ‘vitalization’, where favoured objects are turned into creatures of the imagination.¹

Children have the capacity to make things come alive, to live in the moment, and to engage deeply in the sensual. They are always anticipatory, with short attention spans: little Jill or Johnny will not wait, they want it now! These qualities make them ideal consumers. Indeed, going shopping with young children can be especially challenging. ‘Daddy!… I want that!…’ Desperate to hush their shouting, many parents give in to their children, and buy them some small treat to restore peace.

A child will display the same ‘hedonic adaptation’ we notice as adults but in an accelerated mode. This is the tendency for the newly purchased object to decline in value over time as we become used to it. But in children this week’s treat (or upset) is soon forgotten as other more interesting or exciting things come into view. And so begins the child’s passage into consumerism – an unfair contest that is really between the parent and the store or the media, but is often turned into one between parent and child.²

Over the last 50 years or so marketers have entered the world of childhood and made it their own. Children, like most adults, are now subject to an average of 3,000 or so advertisements each day, and most online games they play or TV programmes they watch have pop-up or full-length ads. As Juliet Schor points out, ‘the typical first grader can evoke 200 brands. And he or she has already accumulated an unprecedented number of possessions, beginning with an average of 70 new toys a year.’Although these might be American statistics, more and more children around the world are starting life in a similar, heavily commercialized childhood.³

In some respects, this targeting of children is not new; shops have been seducing children since the eighteenth century. However, today’s media is another matter. Ubiquitous and immersive, it now captures a lot of ‘spare time’ in many lives, especially those of children. With a TV in most bedrooms, children are now exposed to almost continuous media manipulation. As one friend, a schoolteacher, told me recently, at least two to three children in each class of seven- or eight-year-olds will now answer the age-old question of ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ with something like ‘I want to be rich’, or ‘I want to be famous’.

As they grow up, children look to the models of behaviour and possession they see around them – especially those in the media – to work out what adult life is about. For example, even though I was born in the 1950s and, as a child, had limited access to most media, I remember, as a boy of about 12, suddenly becoming fascinated with expensive Italian sports cars. I leafed through old magazines and gazed lovingly at their designs, colours, powerful engines and lavish interiors. I couldn’t drive, my father was not really interested in cars, and I had seen only one or two such cars on the streets. But looking at the pictures, and perhaps influenced by the comics and adventure books I was reading, I would imagine myself ‘one day’ owning one, and tearing around at high speed, doing all those exciting things I imagined real adults did.

Emerging from the chrysalis of childhood, teenagers now are more vulnerable to the siren song of consumerism, since their paths to adulthood have been more intensely and deliberately shaped by the media than children of my generation ever were. This emphasizes the importance of having the ‘right’ stuff to become who they want to be. In a famous recent case, a group was arrested for breaking into the houses of celebrities in Hollywood and stealing their clothes and other possessions, a catalogue of ‘cool’, especially elevated for them by its intimate links with their most admired celebrities. These young people were all from middle-class backgrounds, and had no history of crime.⁴

In their confessions to the LA police, and to Vanity Fair, which immediately published a remarkable story about their adventures, it became clear that these 18- to 20-year-olds thought of themselves as apprentices to their victim-heroes. Bizarrely, one of the perpetrators showed up at court with her own small film crew, to create what was to become part of an episode in her self-penned fashion and celebrity blog. The thrill for these kids was not so much gaining money from their thefts, for they had access to this at home, but from possessing and using the luxury branded clothes and accessories they aspired to own. The things they took from their heroes’ homes had a special, almost magical aura through their intimate associations. In true Hollywood style, this curious story was turned into a film, Sophie Coppola’s remarkable The Bling Ring.

Deception and choice in consumerism

Like young children in the supermarket, or teenagers hanging out in the mall, as adults we too face an abundance of advertisements for competing goods and services. Often with insufficient or deceptive information, we are obliged to work out whether we really need them, or if we can afford them. While most choices in consumption are relatively straightforward, with few negative consequences, others are more challenging. For example, buying a house or car, perhaps involving large debts, can undermine our peace of mind and, in some circumstances, lead to conflicts with families or friends.

Choice with regard to consumption can be tension-filled; so much seems to hang upon the choices we have to make, and dealing with them takes up a lot of mental space. So we might find ourselves buying a new suit for a job interview, upgrading our phone to make sure no one at a meeting will think worse of us, or even paying too much for a car, simply because we do not want to look bad in the eyes of others. Many of these decisions are now driven by time pressure, by a desire to do the right thing, or perhaps to avoid others’ negative judgements.⁵

Deception is built into consumerism, not just because advertisers want to trick us or seduce our children, but because deception, and self-deception, are essential aspects of consumption itself, and are part of the everyday experience of both buyer and seller. As buyers we have to believe in the ‘good life’, or at least a better life, that the new product or service promises, and that the particular house or car we are interested in will indeed satisfy our hopes and needs. When we are given the keys, or take the new car home, we are also committed financially, so we now believe in the virtues of that house or car, and it becomes an essential part of our lives, and of who we think we are.

Sellers, too, have to believe that the product or service they are offering is worth its price, and that advertising, and selling it, is worth the effort required. Owning a Ford franchise, for example, will influence a businessman to ‘appreciate’ the virtues of what he is selling, and also commit him to the brand, and to a belief in its superiority to other similar cars. Having paid money for one of his cars, we have also committed ourselves to a belief in the value of our purchase. We now have to believe, or at least half-believe, in the myth of the brand, and in the car’s unique features.⁶

While all marketing and advertising must ‘create the need’ for consumer products, the process also involves confronting and influencing this deeper psychological bonding between person and product or experience. It means the advertiser must somehow create or excite in the consumer a sense that something is lacking. Like the child in the sandpit who notices another child has the bigger, newer and better truck to play with, we are constantly made aware that what we have is perhaps not quite as good as it might be, compared with what someone else has. This gives all consumers an ‘itch’ for more, a more that can bring them only temporary satistfaction, until the ‘next best thing’ comes along. From the other side, the seller must entice the buyer, and present the object for sale as ‘the best’ in its category, as full of promise, and personally transformative – a veritable pot of gold at the end of the consumer’s particular rainbow.

The idea of luxury

Consumerism presented in this way is necessarily delusive – a process of imagining, comparing, and possessing that is frequently entangled in our hopes and dreams. Its delusive qualities are binding, influencing our commitments and beliefs, and our sense of who we are. These qualities are particularly clear when we consider luxury goods; their intense desirability, and the very idea of the elusive and exclusive nature of ‘luxury’, are used to present and sell many products today. Luxury, by definition, is what we imagine to be the ‘best’, the most valuable, or the ultimate in a particular class of goods. What is designated as a ‘luxury’ is usually something that we can physically possess, use or enjoy – such as clothing, cars, houses, personal accessories, food or drink.

In the ‘Bling Ring’ case, the police had to believe that the kids involved were stealing luxury goods for their market value – ‘for money’ – and this was the prosecutor’s case. One detective, however, admitted to Vanity Fair that there was something ‘weird’ going on, and that there was something ‘stalkerish’ in their desire to wear what their celebrity heroes had worn. These luxury goods had, by association, become unique, the very best of the best, the ultimate prize in a fashion-loving teenage world saturated with images of elusive and otherwise impossible to earn luxuries.⁷

The ‘spookiness’ the detective noticed is an essential component of the delusion of consumerism: it is the belief that a particular desired product, and especially a luxury one, will somehow transform us, and our experience, into something better, or even the best we can imagine, and also of course something socially superior. For luxury has always been held up as the ultimate social standard or measure of value, and a signal that the owner is ‘higher’ up the social tree, and somehow beyond the ordinary.

Indeed, in the distant past luxury was restricted to kings and princes, and only later ‘allowed’ to descend to merchants and those socially ‘below’ the very wealthy. So luxury has always had a powerful and dynamic role in shaping consumption practices ‘below it’, provoking both the cupidity of the buyer who desires it more than anything else, and that of the seller, who wants to exploit this unquenchable ‘need’ or desire for her own profit. Since luxury is so desirable, it is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, not only for the buyer, but also for the seller.⁸

The word ‘luxury’ seems to behave more like an adjective than a noun. In the minds of the elite who can afford such ‘heavenly goods’, it is attached to something, and then, when the luxury item in question has been copied cheaply, and loses its original rarity and exclusivity, something else that is also rare and expensive will take its place. In a memorable passage, the historian Fernand Braudel lists dozens of now everyday items that in the past moved, much more slowly than most luxuries do today, from the category of ‘luxury’ to that of ‘ordinary’; he includes sugar, pepper, ceramic plates, metal forks, glass windowpanes and chairs in this list.

Availability and price are critical in this ‘descent’, or ‘democratization’, of luxury. As Braudel explains: luxury ‘has many facets, according to the period, country or civilization in question. In contrast, the social drama, without beginning or end, with luxury as its prize and its theme, scarcely changes at all…’ Luxury, he concludes, not only represents ‘rarity and vanity, but also social success, fascination, the dream that one day becomes reality for the poor, and in so ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The problem with consumerism
• Part I: From consumption to consumerism
• Part II: The escalation of consumption
• Part III: Towards sustainable consumption
• Conclusion
• About the author