I enjoyed this week's topic, looking at homes, clutter and storage, especially the contrast between historical intentional 'clutter' which really was more just a busy aesthetic to show off your possessions and the modern sense of the word where unused items sit in a mess, unordered and in the way of their owners.
Now, because goods are cheaper and accessible to most, having a lot of stuff is not seen as a good thing. So we hide it away to achieve modern slick lines with less visual distraction. In other words storage is seen as a solution for this clutter problem, instead of buying less. Objects also become representative of our personalities; there is so much choice that we can now group and define people by their consumer choices.
The question brought up by Alison Slater during the lecture of 'what would happen if you were reconstructed according to your facebook information' was a scary one; it demonstrated that ultimately, stuff whether real or virtual cannot ever really describe a person.
I am aware that I have become more involved with trends since beginning my degree, trying to keep up with others' opinions of what should be made and bought. I never used to care that much, buying things I happened across because I liked them, and bought into the concept of the market less. It makes me wary of how much I will need to adapt my designs to fit into the jobs market, but it might be a necessary evil and I do realise that if you shop in a mainstream shop you're already part of the system whether you agree with it or not.
This leads on to the question 'is designing more stuff really ethical?'; I suppose the answer should be no. However, there is definitely a link between ones' surroundings and psychological well-being, and given that people in general are in a constant state of flux in terms of emotion and circumstances there is an argument that simply changing small aspects of design could make you feel better. The idea of changeable design could be a way around this in the future; a high tech fabric could act like an etch-a-sketch, where you could wipe away an old design and replace it, with special effects giving the illusion of texture. This would never replace the traditional real feel of fabric but with products such as wallpaper this might not be as important. One problem is that with certain things, just having an object feels better; books and dvds are things I would never part with. Storing them digitally just doesn't work for me. So perhaps it is the idea of ownership and accumulation that needs to change; libraries, swap shops, charity and recycling are ways around this. But again this comes back to the question of what happens to pure creativity if you always start with someone else's design and adapt it slightly? To find a compromise we could look at environmentally sound ways of production, to enable new ideas to be generated and made into products without the worry of adding to the pile.
Meanwhile, I could probably do with some more storage...
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