To Have or Not To Have In my old flat-sharing community, there was a poster whose platitudinous exclamation I quote from time to time: Who lives, disturbs. The updated version would probably read: Who lives, destroys. For he who lives cannot not consume — and every consumption has its costs…

Never Mind The Product — You Are Okay You see the goods and wonder how and when it could happen. For example, tea blends: Happy Nature, Soul Balm, Inner Harmony, and Women’s Tea. When and how did this happen, that the promises of marketing emancipated themselves from the products, that…

Three questions for the goods Buying a product is a lengthy, usually annoying affair. If you “research” a product on the net this might sound familiar, but even if you put a carton of milk in your shopping cart, it took a lot of time. Probably few during that one…

Consumption is the permanent task of distinguishing between personal needs and social promises What about »use-value«? Doesn’t sound very sexy when you put it like that. Telling a story about the benefits of a warm blanket won’t make you look like a sophisticated consumer — but if you add that…

In consumerism, »value« is a cross-functional concept that bridges culture and economy. “Value” is a fancy word for preference management gone social. As such, it is highly pervasive and can be found anywhere: a spoon is considered a valuable tool the value of commodities come as prices companies want to…

My shelf controls the number of books I keep. And since I keep buying, I have to get rid of old ones. So time and again, I leaf through them, questioning which ones may stay. So I encountered Martin Parr’s “Boring Postcards” again. The first book features historical postcards from…

On productive fallacies The concept of “branding” is the holy grail of marketing. Unfortunately, I regularly get a mild bellyache from the ubiquitous, hackneyed sets of advice that pour out of this grail. That is true for me as a consumer, but even more so as an active participant in a world that…

How to explain »design thinking« to outsiders? Try using these pop culture mockups to mirror the process If you are somewhat familiar with the basics of UX Design, I would like you to read this text as a short and fuzzy kind of usability test. What will we be testing…

The »user« is a means to reflection that is empty and overloaded at the same time, blurring the traditional differences between reception, production and consumption. Its complexity grows tremendously, forcing the design process to treat the user as its ground zero of knowledge. The »User« is an empty formula. He/she…