I just read some comments to the latest David Report bulletin called “I shop therefore I am” in “The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption”. It’s a year-long book-as-a-blog experiment in why we choose to consume, or not, written by India based Gaurav Mishra. In a very clear and comprehensible way he is putting together a couple of important trends that in one way or another describes how our consumption pattern are about to change:

- From conspicuous consumption to conscious consumption.
- From brand-consciousness to background-consciousness.
- From synthetic to organic.
- From mass-produced to hand-crafted.
- From global to local.
- From short-term to sustainable.
- From fashionable to durable.
- From valuing things to valuing insights.
- From fitting in/ standing out to being.
- From buying more to buying less.
- From doing more to doing less.
- From multi-tasking to down-shifting.
- From buying to sharing/ exchanging.
- From owning to experiencing.
- From having to giving.

Sounds quite attractive to me… What do you think?

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Andra bloggar om: shopping, konsumtion, trender, kultur

Next Friday, April 4, issue nine of the David Report Bulletin will be released. The title will be “I shop therefore I am” and it will concern future consumerism and consumption culture. Among other things you will be able to find interesting texts from Kristina Dryza, freelance strategist and designer and Sante Poromaa, teacher at The Zenbuddhist Society in Stockholm. There will also be an interview with Mathilda Tham, guest professor at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm. Here’s a short introduction text by Sante Poromaa:

“In the future luxury goods will be methods that bring us back the power of our own attention: the power to choose ourselves what we want to notice or not. And there lies the true luxury of the future, to be able to resist shopping and still be happy.”

To be sure to get a notice when “I shop therefore I am” is released please go to the David Report home page and sign up for a subscription. And the best of all, it’s free!

Image by Barbara Kruger.

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tags technorati : david report future consumerism future shopping trends future consumption

Andra bloggar om: david report, trender, framtid, shopping, konsumtion, design

Tomorrow November 24th is the international Buy Nothing Day (November 23rd in the US). More than 65 nations around the globe are involved. The first Buy Nothing Day was organized in Vancouver back in 1992 and has subsequently been promoted by the Canadian Adbusters magazine. The describe the Buy Nothing Day like this; “it isn’t just about changing your habits for one day” but “about starting a lasting lifestyle commitment to consuming less and producing less waste“. According to me it’s an important day for society to examine the issue of over-consumption. As I have mention before it’s impossible to just go on and buy more and more useless stuff. It’s about time to really think about our consumption and try to buy less but better products. I hope that this day of austerity could lead on to a more open-minded attitude towards materialism and the wear-and-tear society we are all part of.

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tags technorati : consumerism buy_nothing_day adbusters materialism

Andra bloggar om: en köpfri dag, konsumtion, miljö, prylar, politik, moral

Buy Less Crap started the other day as an reaction to the RED campaign founded by Bono (as I wrote about here a couple of month ago) and they offer people to donate directly to RED’s beneficiary The Global Fund among others without consuming. Buy Less Crap brings forward that shopping is not a smart response to human suffering around the world. It’s a tricky question. Because people ARE consuming. We will not be able to change that in the short run. Unfortunately they buy a lot of crap. But consuming is a powerful tool. Tim Power who is a co-writer here at David Report made a clever comment to the original post about RED and I would like to bring it forward in full:

RED is a fantastic example of what can happen when consumption meets social responsibility. I have always believed that one of the tools of individual empowerment given each and everyone of us upon birth or immigration into an economically liberal democratic society is the power of the political vote, but equally important is the power of the ‘economic vote’.
Each and every Dollar (or Euro of whatever) we spend on a product or service is a vote for (or against) the process, quality, belief system or form of what we buy. Every dollar we spend is a vote - you use what you buy to empower what you believe in! Go Bono.

Thanks to Josh Spear.

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Andra bloggar om: shopping, etik, välgörenhet, filantropi, hjälporganisation