‘NOT FOR SALE: Redefining Design Culture’
CHANGEX 2005 POSITION STATEMENTS
Launched in 2004, CHANGEX is an annual event hosted by Change Design in order to support new developments in sustainable design theory and practice emerging in the work of students. The supplementary forum and workshop play a key role in enabling participants to engage with these issues on a range of levels, and in building a critical and inclusive design community.
Change Design invites you to be provoked, be inspired and make a difference.
Cultivating Frugality in the Midst of Affluence
What does it mean to be frugal?
The word frugal means for example, ‘practicing or marked by economy, as in the expenditure of money or the use of material resources’. Being frugal has many negative connotations in our affluent consumer culture: ‘mean’, ‘penny-pinching’, ‘miserly’, ‘thrifty’, ‘tight’, ‘shrewd’ etc. On the other side of the coin, consumerism has laid claim to the meaning of generosity, indelibly linking giving, sharing and relating and all of the good feeling associated with these activities to material luxury and the acquisition of new products. Ezio Manzini calls this ‘product-based well-being’. Through its appropriation of important rituals like gift-giving, consumer culture promises that you can remain secretly frugal (i.e. mean, penny-pinching) while pretending to be generous. The signs of affluence are cheap and plentiful and always getting cheaper.
What is the alternative? We could eschew materialism. Liberate ourselves from the accoutrements of mainstream culture and basically ‘get real’. I was into being real for a while. When I was a student I shuffled around campus barefoot, lived in tiny, shabby rooms in group houses, demonstrated, followed every product boycott and went to environmental festivals at Byron Bay. I wore the vestiges of a frugal lifestyle well and learnt to see through all the false affluence of my prior life (while of course it was because of the time and means afforded me by this life that I was able to become ‘counter-cultural’ in the first place).
Another alternative is to embrace our affluence. In Cradle to Cradle William McDonough and Michael Braungart suggest that the pared back frugality of the counter-cultural lifestyle doesn’t actually make a difference and is no fun anyway. They argue that we don’t have to make this sacrifice - in fact, it’s not natural. For them, material abundance is a basic good of human life. Environmental problems have emerged only because the industrial means of manufacturing abundance have been badly designed.
But neither of these alternatives makes any difference to product-based well-being, because neither resource a different way of relating to things. We live in a culture engineered for consumption. Consequently, we have no idea how to appropriately value things. We therefore need to proceed with caution. Consumerism has taught us what it means to be frugally generous. So what would it mean to be generously frugal? How could design culture, which is so deeply implicated in consumerism, facilitate the practice of frugality? How could it enhance the joys of giving old things new life, or sharing valued things with others? How could it teach us to appreciate the generosity of the object left on the footpath or the enduring value of the seasoned thing that is still in use? Design needs to stop producing half-thought but fully rendered ‘solutions’ and start aiding the development of material ingenuity. In this way we might slowly alienate the hollow generosity of consumerism.
Posted by on 03/17 at 04:32 PMThere’s a new version:
froo·gle (fru’gal) n. Smart shopping through Google.
Had a hard time finding anything other than bargains for ‘smart’ shoppers of new posessions, but there are plenty of links to pre-loved ebay goods.
Posted by on 04/06 at 09:08 PM
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