Why Do We Continuously Consume?

In today’s society it seems as though the number of items that any one person can own is endless. Companies are endlessly producing items to maximize their own profit, encouraging people keep buying, not encouraging consumers to keep and care for their items. So many products are designed to be unfixable, continual shifts in technology makes electronic products feel obsolete within a year — the ultimate lifecycle of products is so incredibly short.

And we as consumers exist in this throwaway society. We consume items knowing that we so easily could replace anything that we buy. The lack of attachment we feel to every product we interact with in our daily lives is what makes it so easy to cut that lifecycle of the product so short. Some items we dispose of because they are genuinely broken, other just because our relationships with the items are broken, or were never fully formed in the first place.

So how do we break this pattern of endless consumption? According to Professor Jonathan Chapman, we can work to break this pattern of consumption by designing products in a manner that allow them to be “emotionally durable.” Chapman believes that if we are able to design products in a manner that the products themselves begin to grow and change overtime with our own interests then we will not throw them away as easily as we do currently. There are some items that we keep for decades, like teddy bears from our childhood, items that we have a deep emotional connection with, and a story attached to them.

So if we work as designers to create products with a story, they will foster emotional connections with their owners, and therefore be significantly longer lasting.

Taking action against our consumerist tendencies and culture is crucial at this point. As the individual continues to consume, the number of products that they throw away also continues to grow. Looking at the fashion industry — 26 billion pounds of textiles end up in the landfill each year, and we are all contributing to that waste currently. That doesn’t even take into account the endless number of other products we consume on a daily basis, from our single use coffee cups from Starbucks every morning to our outdated iPhones that we update every 2 years.

So we as designers can take conscious decisions to make products that people want to hold on to, want to take care of, and want to repair. Emotionally durable design can then be extended past just the creation of the product itself, but also the creation of systems that easily allow outdated products to be repaired, updated, and overall given a new life for the consumers.